A PADRE 
IN FRANCE 



GEORGE A.BIRMINGHAM 



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Front — " A Padi*e> 
in France." 



A PADRE IN FRANCE 



A PADRE IN FRANCE 



BY 

GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM cbjeuia 

Kav>vi»yj Tames Owen *~~~ 

AUTHOR OF 

"THB MAJOR'S NIECE," "GENERAL JOHN REGAN," " SPANISH GOLD" 
"BENEDICT KAVANAGH,' ETC. 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



-0 **+,*& 



Gift 
Publisher 

MAY 2>: 1919 



Ul \. 






Printed in Grtat Britain by Haiell, Watson & V'rty, Ld-, 
London and Aylesbury. 



TO 

R. M. L. 

FRIEND AND FELLOW-WORKER 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

THE UTTERMOST PART . . . .15 



CHAPTER II 

GETTING THERE ..... 27 



CHAPTER III 

A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE ... 40 



CHAPTER IV 

SETTLING DOWN . .... 52 

II 



12 CONTENTS 



CHAPTER V 

RAM 

KHAKI ....... G3 



CHAPTER VI 

LEISURE HOURS ..... 78 



CHAPTER VII 

COMING AND GOING ..... 95 



CHAPTER VIII 

WOODBINE HUT . . . . .115 



CHAPTER [X 

Y.S.C. ...... 181 



CONTENTS 13 



CHAPTER X 

facie 
THE DAILY ROUND ..... 151 



CHAPTER XI 

ANOTHER JOURNEY . . . . .164 



CHAPTER XII 

MADAME ....... 177 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE CON. CAMP ..... 194 



CHAPTER XIV 

A BACKWATER ...••• 214 



14 CONTENTS 



CHAPTER XV 

PAOfl 

MY THIRD CAMP 229 



CHAPTER XVI 

LEAVE ....... 245 

CHAPTER XVII 

A HOLIDAY ...... 261 

CHAPTER XVIII 

PADRES ....... 275 

CHAPTER XIX 

CITIZEN SOLDIERS ..... 289 



CHAPTER I 

THE UTTERMOST PART 

I have always admired the sagacity of 
Balak, King of Moab, about whom we learn 
something in the Book of Numbers. He 
was threatened with invasion by a powerful 
foe and felt unequal to offering armed re- 
sistance. He invoked the aid of spiritual 
powers by inviting a prophet, Balaam, to 
come and curse the army of the invaders. 
Balaam suffered himself to be persuaded 
and bribed by the king. All kings — and 
the statesmen who nowadays regulate the 
conduct of kings — understand the business 
of managing men so far. Persuasion and 
bribery are the methods of statecraft. But 
Balak knew more than the elements of his 
trade. He understood that spiritual forces, 
if merely bribed, are ineffective. To make 
a curse operate there must be a certain 
amount of conviction in the mind of the 
curser. Balaam was not convinced, and 
when he surveyed the hosts of Israel from 
the top of a hill felt himself compelled by 

15 



16 THE UTTERMOST PART 

the spirit within him to bless instead of 
curse. The king, discouraged but not hope- 
less, took the prophet to the top of another 
hill, showed him a different view of the 
camp of Israel and invited him to curse the 
people from there. 

At first sight this seems a foolish thing 
to have done ; but properly considered it 
appears very crafty. From the fresh view- 
point, Balaam saw not the whole, but only 
the " uttermost part " of the hosts of Israel. 
I suppose he no longer saw the first-line 
troops, the army in battle array. Instead 
he saw the base camps, the non-combatant 
followers of the army, a great deal that was 
confused and sordid, very little that was 
glorious or fine. It might conceivably have 
been possible for him to curse the whole 
army and cast a blight upon its enterprise, 
when his eyes rested only on the camp- 
followers, the baggage trains, the mobs of 
cattle, the maimed and unfit men ; when 
the fine show of the fighters was out of sight. 
Plainly if a curse of any real value was to 
be pronounced it must be by a prophet 
who saw much that was execrable, little 
that was obviously glorious. 

It is Balak's sagacity in choosing the 
prophet's second point of view which I 



THE UTTERMOST PART it 

admire. If any cursing of an army is done 
at all, it will be done by some one, whose 
post is behind the lines, who has seen, not 
the whole, but only the uttermost part, and 
that the least attractive part of the hosts. 

It was my luck to remain, all the time I 
was in France, in safe places. I never had 
the chance of seeing the gallantry of the 
men who attack or the courageous tenacity 
of those who defend. I missed all the 
excitement. I experienced none of those 
hours of terror which I have heard described, 
nor saw how finely man's will can triumph 
over terror. I had no chance of knowing 
that great comradeship which grows up 
among those who suffer together. War, 
seen at the front, is hell. I hardly ever met 
any one who doubted that. But it is a hell 
inhabited not by devils, but by heroes, and 
human nature rises to unimaginable heights 
when it is subjected to the awful strain of 
fighting. It is no wonder that those who 
have lived with our fighting army are 
filled with admiration for the men, are 
prepared to bless altogether, not war which 
we all hate, but the men who wage it. 

The case is very different behind the 
lines. There, indeed, we see the seamy 
side of war. There are the men who, in 
2 



18 THE UTTERMOST PART 

some way or other, have secured and keep 
safe jobs, the embusques whom the French 
newspapers constantly denounce. There are 
the officers who have failed, proved unfit 
for command, shown themselves lacking in 
courage perhaps, and in mercy have been 
sent down to some safe base. There are 
the men who have been broken in spirit 
as well as in body, who drag on an existence 
utterly dull, very toilsome, well-nigh hope- 
less, and are illuminated by no high call 
for heroic deeds. There the observer sees 
whatever there is to be seen of petty spite 
and jealousies, the manipulating of jobs, 
the dodging of regulations, all that is most 
ignoble in the soldier's trade. There also 
are the men with grievances, who, in their 
own estimation, are fit for posts quite other 
than those they hold. Some one described 
war at the front as an affair of months of 
boredom punctuated by moments of terror. 
If that philosopher had been stationed at 
a base he might have halved his epigram 
and described war as months of boredom 
unpunctuated even by terror. 

Yet even behind the lines, in the remotest 
places, that which moves our admiration 
far outshines what is sordid and mean. We 
still bless, not war, but soldiers. We forget 



THE UTTERMOST PART 19 

the failures of man in joyful contemplation 
of his achievements. 

Here are the great hospitals, where suffer- 
ing men succeed each other day after day, 
so that we seem to see a mist of pain rising 
like a ceaseless cloud of incense smoke for 
the nostrils of the abominable Moloch who 
is the god of war. A man, though long 
inured to such things, may curse the Moloch, 
but he will bless the sufferers who form the 
sacrifice. Their patience, their silent hero- 
ism, are beyond our praise. 

Here are huge cemeteries, long lines of 
graves, where every morning some are laid 
to rest, with reverence indeed, but with 
scant measure of the ritual pomp with which 
men are wont to pay their final honour to 
the dead. These have passed, not in a 
moment amid the roar of battle, but after 
long bearing of pain, and lonely, with the 
time for last farewells but none greatly 
loved to say them to. Yet, standing above 
the lines of rude coffins, viewing the names 
and numbers pencilled on the lids, our hearts 
are lifted up. We know how great it is to 
lay down life for others. The final wailing 
notes of the " Last Post " speak our feeling : 
" Good night. Good-bye. See you again, 
soon." 



20 THE UTTERMOST PART 

Here, among those less worthy, are men 
who are steadily doing, without much hope 
of praise, things intolerably monotonous, 
doing them day after day for years, inspired 
by what Ruskin calls " the unvexed instinct 
of duty." Often these are old men, too 
old for field command. They have spent 
their lives in the army, have learned, have 
worked, have waited in the hope that some 
day their chance would come. Soldiers by 
profession and desire, they have looked for 
the great opportunity which the war they 
foresaw would give. The war came and 
the opportunity ; but came too late for 
them. They can look for nothing but the 
dull duties of the base. They do them, 
enduring minor hardships, facing ceaseless 
worries, going calmly on, while the great 
stream of war on which they hoped to float 
moves on, leaving them behind. With them 
are others, younger men, who have seen 
some fighting, have been wounded or broken 
in health. Often they have struggled hard 
to secure the posts they hold. They might 
have gone home. They counted it a desir- 
able thing to be employed still, since actual 
fighting was impossible, somewhere in touch 
with fighting men. 

I wonder how much Balaam divined of 



THE UTTERMOST PART 21 

the greatness which, no doubt, was in " the 
uttermost part " of the host when the king 
showed it to him. I suppose he under- 
stood something of it, for once again, to 
the indignation of Balak, he blessed instead 
of cursing. I am sure that any one who has 
lived long among the men at our bases 
will feel as I do. that his pride in what is 
great there far outweighs his disappointment 
at the other things he saw. I never saw 
the fighting or the actual front, but even 
if I had seen nothing else but the fighting 
I could scarcely feel greater admiration for 
our officers and men or more love for them. 
I have, of course, no tales of adventure 
to tell. Perhaps I am too old for adven- 
turing, or never had the spirit which makes 
adventures possible. Yet I own to a certain 
feeling of disappointment when the doctor 
who examined me in London told me with 
almost brutal frankness that he would not 
allow me to be sent to the front. To France 
I might go, and even that permission, I 
think, was a concession. But in France I 
must remain in places where hardship is 
not extreme. Doctors are powerful people 
in the army and in certain matters their 
word is the supreme law. But fortunately 
there are always other doctors. And I 



22 THE UTTERMOST PART 

think I could in the end have managed to 
get to the very front, in spite of that first 
man, though he held high rank and was 
much be-tabbed. But by the time I found 
out how to get round his prohibition I had 
become so much interested in my work 
that I did not want to leave it and even felt 
grateful to that doctor for sending me to 
France in the position of a man marked 
P.B., letters which stand for Permanent 
Base, and mean that their bearer will not 
be asked to go where fighting is. 

For one other thing I am thankful to 
the doctor who examined me. He did not 
ask me to be vaccinated, inoculated, or half- 
poisoned in any other way. If he had 
demanded such things of me before I held 
my commission, I might have had to yield, 
and I should have disliked the business 
greatly. Afterwards I remained an un- 
persecuted heretic and never underwent 
any of these popular operations. For 
months, I know, a form was constantly 
filled up about me and sent to the medical 
staff of the base at which I was, stating 
the awful fact that I had escaped the safe- 
guards provided for me, and was still alive. 
I used to expect that trouble of some sort 
would arise, but none ever did. Perhaps 



THE UTTERMOST PART 23 

the authorities were merciful to me because 
I made no attempt to propagate my opin- 
ions ; which indeed are scarcely opinions. 
I should not dream of denying that inocula- 
tion of every known kind is excellent for 
other people, and ought to be rigorously 
enforced on them. My only strong feeling 
is that I should escape. 

My medical examination was a much 
more rigorous and unpleasant business than 
my interview — I can scarcely call this an 
examination— with my particular chief, the 
Chaplain-General. He appeared to be satis- 
fied by previous inquiries that I was a fit 
and proper person — or as little unfit as 
could reasonably be hoped — to minister to 
soldiers in France. He took down my 
answers to half a dozen questions on a sheet 
of paper which somebody afterwards must 
have lost, for I had to answer the same 
questions again by letter after I got to 
France. 

Up to the point of my interview and 
examination in London, the negotiations 
with regard to my commission as Chaplain 
to the Forces were conducted with dignified 
deliberation. My letters were answered a 
fortnight or so after they were received. 
There was no sense of urgency or hurry. 



24 THE UTTERMOST PART 

We might have been corresponding about a 
monument to be erected at a remote date 
to some one still alive and quite young. 
This, if slightly irritating, gave me a feeling 
of great confidence in the Chaplains' De- 
partment of the War Office. It was evi- 
dently a body which worked methodically, 
carefully, and with due consideration of 
every step it took. Its affairs were likely 
to prove efficiently organised. I looked 
forward to finding myself part of a machine 
which ran smoothly, whose every cog fitted 
exactly into the slot designed for it. No 
part of the War Office was likely at the 
moment to adopt a German motto ; but the 
Chaplains' Department was plainly inspired 
by the spirit of Goethe's Ohne haste, ohne 
raste. 

I have heard other men complain that 
the Department is dilatory, not merely 
deliberate, and that it is often impossible 
to get an answer to a letter at all. There 
is a story told of a man who wrote offering 
his services as chaplain, wrote again after 
a decent interval, continued to write for 
many months, and finally received, by way 
of reply, a nice little tract — not even on 
patience, but on conversion. I do not know 
whether that story is true or not. No tract 



THE UTTERMOST PART 25 

was ever sent to me, and my letters were 
answered — after a time. 

After my visit to London, the interview, 
and the examination, the whole spirit of 
the proceedings changed. I was involved 
in a worse than American hustle, and found 
myself obliged to hustle other innocent 
people, tailors and boot-makers, in order 
to get together some kind of a kit in time 
for a start to be made at the shortest possible 
notice. 

I am told that the whole military machine 
works in this way in dealing with individuals. 
There is a long period of leisurely and quiet 
thought — it sometimes appears of complete 
inertia. Then there is a violent rush, and 
all sorts of things happen in a minute. I 
do not know for certain whether officers 
in other branches of the service suffer in 
this way. My experience as a chaplain 
made me feel like a bullet in a gun. For a 
long time I lay passive, and, except for the 
anxiety of anticipation, at rest. The man 
who held the weapon was making up his 
mind to fire. Then, without any special 
warning to me, he pulled the trigger, and 
before I could take a long breath I was 
flying through space to an unknown destina- 
tion, without even the comfort of knowing 



26 THE UTTERMOST PART 

that I had been aimed at any particular 
object. 

But my faith in the Department was 
unshaken. I remembered the cautious de- 
liberation of the earlier proceedings, and 
came to the conclusion that whereas there 
had been for many months an ample supply 
of chaplains at the front, and a regular flow 
of reinforcements from home, a sudden and 
desperate shortage had occurred — owing to 
casualties in battle, or some kind of pestilence 
— and that it was necessary to rush new 
men to the scene of action at the highest 
speed. This explanation seemed to me 
reasonable. It did not turn out to be true. 
There was no particularly urgent demand 
for chaplains when I reached France. 

I am now inclined to think that the 
Chaplains' Department does its business in 
this particular way with deliberate intention. 
It desires first to produce an impression of 
stability, wisdom, and forethought. It pro- 
ceeds slowly, and for long periods does not 
proceed at all. It also wishes its servants 
to feel that it is vigorous, filled with energy, 
and working at terrifically high pressure. 
Then it does things with a rush which would 
put to shame the managing directors of the 
New York Underground Railway. 



CHAPTER II 

GETTING THERE 

I made my start from Victoria Station on a 
January morning. I had worn His Majesty's 
uniform for no more than two days, and was 
still uneasily conscious of my strange clothes. 
I was uncertain about the proper adjust- 
ment of straps and buttons. I came for the 
first time in my life into touch with the 
army. I, a man of over fifty, went back 
with a leap to the emotions of forty years 
before. I was a new boy in a big school. 

Others — some who have had the experience 
and more who have not — have described 
that start from Victoria or Waterloo. They 
have said something about the pangs of 
farewell, though I cannot imagine how any 
one who has been through it wants to talk 
about that. They have said a good deal 
about the thrill of excitement which comes 
with the beginning of adventure. They 
have described a certain awe of the unknown. 
They have tingled with intense curiosity. 

I confess chiefly to bewilderment, the 

27 



28 GETTING THERE 

discomfort of strangeness and an annoying 
sense of my own extreme insignificance. I 
was a new boy. I wanted to behave pro- 
perly, to do the right thing, and I had no 
way of knowing what the right thing was. I 
was absurdly anxious not to " cheek " any- 
body, and thereby incur the kind of snubbing, 
I scarcely expected the kicks, which I had 
endured long ago when I found myself a 
lonely mite in a corner of the cloisters of 
my first school. 

I sat, with my bundle of papers tucked in 
beside me, in a corner of a Pullman car. 
Opposite me was an officer. I recognised, 
by the look of his Sam Browne belt, that 
he was an old boy, that he had been there 
before. I did not know then, being wholly 
unskilled in pips and badges, what he was. 
My impression now is that he was an artil- 
lery captain, probably returning to the front 
after leave. It seems ridiculous to be afraid 
to speak to an artillery captain ; but nothing 
would have induced me to begin a con- 
versation with that man. For all I knew he 
might have been a general, and it might 
have been the worst kind of bad form for a 
mere padre to speak to a general. I even 
thought of saluting him when I first caught 
his eye, but I did not know how to salute. 



GETTING THERE 29 

It was he, in the end, who spoke to me. 
We had reached the end of our train journey 
and were gathering coats and haversacks 
from the racks above our heads. I left my 
papers — Punch and The Bystander — on the 
seat. 

" You ought to take those with you," 
he said. " You'll find lots of fellows jolly 
thankful to get them over there." 

So I was going to a land where men could 
not easily come by Punch and The By- 
stander. In a general way I knew that 
before he spoke. I had heard of the hard- 
ships of war. I was prepared for my share 
of them. But I had somehow failed to 
realise that it might be impossible, under 
certain circumstances, to buy Punch if I 
wanted it. 

The boat, though we arrived beside it 
early in the morning, did not actually start 
till afternoon. I might have gone to an 
hotel and had a comfortable luncheon. I 
was afraid to do anything of the sort. 
Military discipline is not a thing to play 
tricks with. I had made up my mind 
about that before I started, and in the 
orders given me for my journey there was 
not a word about luncheon. I went hungry 
— foolishly, no doubt. 



80 GETTING THERE 

I heard a story once about a sergeant 
and several men who were cut off by the 
Germans from their battalion. They held 
out for forty hours and were finally rescued. 
It was found that they had not touched 
their iron (emergency) ration. Asked why 
they had gone hungry when they had food 
in their pockets, the sergeant replied that 
the eating of iron rations without orders 
from a superior officer was forbidden. His 
was a great devotion to discipline— heroic, 
though foolish. My abstinence was merely 
foolish. I could not claim that I had any 
direct orders not to go to an hotel for luncheon. 

While I waited on the deck of the steamer 
I met M. He was alone as I was ; but he 
looked much less frightened than I felt. 
He was a padre too ; but his uniform was 
not aggressively new. It seemed to me that 
he might know something about military 
life. My orders were " to report to the 
M.L.O." when I landed. I wanted very 
much to know what that word " report " 
meant. I wanted still more to know what 
an M.L.O. was and where a stray voyager 
would be likely to find him. 

It was not difficult to make friends with 
M. It is never difficult for one padre to 
make friends with another. All that is 



GETTING THERE 81 

necessary by way of introduction is a frank 
and uncensored expression of opinion about 
the Chaplains' Department of the War 
Office. The other man's soul is knit to yours 
at once. I cannot now remember whether 
M. or I attacked the subject first. I know 
we agreed. I suppose it is the same with 
all branches of the service. Combatant 
officers are, or used in those days to be, one 
in heart when discussing the Staff. I never 
met a doctor who did not think that the 
medical services are organised by congenital 
idiots. Every one from the humblest A.S.C. 
subaltern to the haughtiest guardsman agrees 
that the War Office is the refuge of incom- 
petents. Padres, perhaps, express them- 
selves more freely than the others. They are 
less subject to the penalties which threaten 
those who criticise their superiors. But 
their opinions are no stronger than those 
of other people. 

Even without that bond of common 
feeling I think I should have made friends 
with M. No franker, more straightforward, 
less selfish man has crossed the sea to France 
wearing the obscured Maltese Cross which 
decorates the cap of the padre. It was my 
first real stroke of luck that I met M. on 
the deck of that steamer. As it turned out 



32 GETTING THERE 

he knew no more than I did about what lay 
before us. His previous service had been 
in England and he was going to France for 
the first time. An M.L.O. was a mystery 
to him. 

But he was cheerful and self-confident. 
His view was that an exaggerated importance 
might easily be attached to military orders. 
If an M.L.O. turned out to be an accessible 
person, easily recognised, we should report 
to him and set our consciences at ease. If, 
on the other hand, the authorities chose to 
conceal their M.L.O. in some place difficult 
to find, we should not report to him. No- 
thing particular would happen either way. 
So M. thought, and he paced the deck with 
so springy a step that I began to hope he 
might be right. 

Our passage was abominably rough. M., 
who dislikes being sea-sick in public, dis- 
appeared. I think what finished him was 
the sight of an officer in a kilt crawling on 
his hands and knees across the wet and 
heaving deck, desperately anxious to get to 
the side of the ship before his malady reached 
its crisis. M.'s chair was taken by a pathetic- 
looking V.A.D. girl, whose condition soon 
drove me away. 

It is one of the mitigations of the horrors 



GETTING THERE 33 

of this war that whoever takes part in it 
is sure to meet friends whom he has lost 
sight of for years, whom he would probably 
lose sight of altogether if the chances of 
war did not bring unexpected meetings. 
That very first day of my service was rich in 
its yield of old friends. 

When I fled from the sight of the V.A.D.'s 
pale face, I took to wandering about the 
decks and came suddenly on a man whom 
I had last seen at the tiller of a small boat 
in Clew Bay. I was beating windward 
across the steep waves of a tideway. His 
boat was running free with her mainsail 
boomed out ; and he waved a hand to me as 
he passed. Once again we met at sea ; but 
we were much less cheerful. He was re- 
turning to France after leave, to spend the 
remainder of a second winter in the trenches. 
He gave it to me as his opinion that life in 
the Ypres salient was abominable beyond 
description, and that no man could stand 
three winters of it. I wanted to ask him 
questions about military matters, and I might 
have got some light and leading from him 
if I had. But somehow we drifted away 
from the subject and talked about County 
Mayo, about boats, about islands, and other 
pleasant things. 
3 



84 GETTING THERE 

M., recovering rapidly from his sea-sick- 
ness, proved his worth the moment we set 
foot on dry land. He discovered the M.L.O., 
who seemed a little surprised that we should 
have taken the trouble to look him up. We 
left him, and M., still buoyant, found an- 
other official known as an R.T.O. He is a 
man of enormous importance, a controller 
of the destinies of stray details like our- 
selves. He told us that we should reach 
our destination — perhaps I should say our 
first objective — if we took a train from the 
Gare Centrale at 6 p.m. We had a good 
look at the Gare Centrale, to make sure 
that we should know it again. 

Then M. led me off to find a censor. 
Censors, though I did not know it then, are 
very shy birds and conceal their nests with 
the cunning of reed warblers. Hardly any 
one has ever seen a censor. But M. found 
one, and we submitted to his scrutiny letters 
which we had succeeded in writing. After 
that I insisted on getting something to eat. 
I had breakfasted at an unholy hour. I 
had crossed the sea. I had endured great 
mental strain. I had tramped the streets 
of an exceedingly muddy town in a down- 
pour of rain. I felt that I must have food 
and if possible, wine. M. is indifferent to 



GETTING THERE 35 

food and hardly ever tastes wine. But he 
is a kind-hearted man. He agreed to eat 
with me, though I am sure he would much 
rather have looked up another official or 
two, perhaps introduced himself to the Base 
Commandant. 

We went to an hotel, the largest and most 
imposing in the town, but, as I discovered 
months afterwards, quite the worst. There 
I found another friend. Or rather, another 
friend found me. He was a young man in the 
uniform of the R.A.M.C. and he rushed at 
me from the far end of a large salon. I am 
ashamed to say that I neither recognised 
him nor knew his name when he told it to 
me. But there was no doubt of his friendly 
feelings. He asked me where I was going. 
I told him, "G.H.Q." It appeared that 
he had just come from G.H.Q. in a motor. 
How he came to have control of a motor 
I do not know. He was a very junior 
officer, not on anybody's staff and totally 
unconnected with transport of any kind. 
He offered us the car and said that we could 
start any time we liked. He himself was 
going on leave and the car had to go back 
to G.H.Q. I had been distinctly told by 
the R.T.O. to go in a train and — it was my 
first day in the army — I had a very high 



36 GETTING THERE 

idea of the importance of obeying orders. 
M. laughed at me. So did my other friend. 

" Nobody," he said, " cares a pin how 
you get there, and it doesn't matter when. 
This week or next, it's all the same. In 
fact, if I were you I should take a couple 
of days off and see the country before I 
reported at G.H.Q." 

I know now that I might have done this 
and that no one would have been surprised 
or angry if I had. But the new-boy feeling 
was still strong on me. I was afraid. It 
seemed to me an awful thing to go for a 
tour in the war zone in a kidnapped motor, 
which might for all I knew be a car specially 
set apart for the use of the Commander-in- 
Chief. 

At 6 o'clock we started in that car, M., 
I, and a total stranger who emerged from 
the hotel at the last moment and sat on 
my valise. There was also the driver and 
M.'s luggage. M. had a great deal of 
luggage. We were horribly cramped. It 
rained with increasing fury. We passed 
through a region of pallid mud, chalk, I 
suppose, which covered us and the car 
with a slimy paste. But I enjoyed the 
drive. Sentries, French and English, chal- 
lenged us, and I could see the rain glistening 



GETTING THERE 37 

on their bayonets in the light of our lamps. 
We rushed through villages and intensely 
gloomy woods. Sign-posts shone white for 
an instant at cross roads and disappeared. 
The wind whipped the rain against our 
faces. The white slime utterly dimmed 
my spectacles, and I looked out at walls of 
darkness through frosted glass. 

The stranger, balanced perilously on my 
valise, shouted to me the news that G.H.Q. 
had been bombed by aeroplanes the day 
before. It was all that was wanted to 
complete the sense of adventure. I could 
have wished for a bomb or two which would 
miss us, for the sight of a Taube (they were 
Taubes, not Fokkers or Gothas, in those 
days) swooping into sight suddenly through 
the darkness and vanishing again. None 
came. 

We took the advice of our unknown 
travelling companion and engaged rooms 
in the hotel he recommended. It was not 
at all a bad hotel. If we had had any sense 
or experience, we should have dined and 
gone straight to bed. That was what M. 
wanted to do. I suffered from an attack of 
conscience, and insisted that we ought to 
report ourselves to the Deputy Chaplain- 
General, 



38 GETTING THERE 

" Our orders," I reminded M., " are to 
report on arrival.' ' 

We set out to look for the Deputy-Chap- 
lain-General, M. averring that he had a 
special talent for finding his way in strange 
towns at night. Owing to what are officially 
known as the " unhappy divisions " of the 
Christian Church, there are two chief chap- 
lains in France. One controls the clergy 
of the Church of England. The other drives 
a mixed team of Roman Catholics, Presby- 
terians, Methodists, and others who owe 
spiritual allegiance to what is called " The 
United Board." At that time both these 
gentlemen had offices in the same town. 

In spite of M.'s instinct for locality we 
came on the wrong one first. Our chief was 
located in the most obscure corner. We 
found him at last, or rather we found his 
office. The good man himself was probably 
in bed. An orderly invited us to write our 
names in block capitals, insisting severely 
on the block capitals, in a large book. Then 
— he must have recognised that we were 
new boys and gullible — he said that we ought 
to report ourselves to some one else called 
the billeting officer. 

The fact that we were already provided 
with beds made no difference. To the 



GETTING THERE 39 

billeting officer we ought to go. It is greatly 
to our credit that we did. I followed M. 
through the streets of that town, very 
narrow streets, very twisty and very badly 
lighted. I felt as Carruthers did when Davis 
piloted him across the sand-banks through 
the fog to Memert. It was 11 o'clock when 
we found the billeting officer. He was 
playing bridge and did not in the least want 
to see us, appeared indeed to think that our 
visit was unnecessary and troublesome. We 
left him hurriedly. 

Our hotel seemed a home when we got 
back to it. A friendly subaltern helped us 
out of a difficulty and increased our know- 
ledge of the French language by telling us 
that : 

" In this country when you want soda 
water you say 4 Oh, gas us.' " 

We said it to the damsel behind the bar, 
and I have seldom been more surprised 
than I was when she produced a siphon. 
After that we went to bed. 



CHAPTER III 

A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 

Next morning we went to see the Deputy- 
Chaplain-General. It is not right or pos- 
sible, either in the army or anywhere else, 
to plunge straight into very august presences. 
We introduced ourselves first to a staff 
officer. I was impressed afresh with the 
way the war throws old acquaintances 
together. I had taken that staff officer out 
trout-fishing, when he was a small boy, and 
he remembered it. He said that Irish trout 
gave better sport than those in the French 
rivers, from which I gathered that it was 
sometimes possible to get a little fishing, 
in between battles and other serious things. 
He had also been a college friend of M.'s at 
Cambridge. He asked us to luncheon and 
treated us most hospitably. Indeed, I 
formed an impression that officers, at all 
events staff officers at G.H.Q., are not 
badly fed. I have in my time " sat at rich 

40 



A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 41 

men's feasts." That staff officers' luncheon 
did not suffer by comparison. M. is, as I 
said, indifferent to food, but even he was 
moved to admiration. 

" If this," he said afterwards, " is war, 
the sooner it comes to England the bet- 
ter." 

It is pleasant to be treated as an honoured 
guest, and the friendliness of that officer 
was reassuring. But I had not yet done 
with the new-boy feeling. It came on me 
with full force when I was led into an inner 
office for an interview with the Deputy- 
Chaplain-General. He was both a bishop 
and a general. I have met so many bishops, 
officially and otherwise, that I am not in 
the least afraid of them. Nor do generals 
make me nervous when I am not myself 
in uniform. But a combination of bishop 
and general was new to me. I felt ex- 
actly as I did in 1875, when Mr. Water- 
field of Temple Grove tested my know- 
ledge of Latin to see what class I was 
fit for. 

There was no real cause for nervousness. 
The Deputy-Chaplain-General, in spite of 
his double dose of exalted rank, is kind and 
friendly : but I fear I did not make any 
better impression on him than I did on my 



42 A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 

first head master. Mr. Waterfield put me 
in his lowest class. The Deputy-Chaplain- 
General sent me to the remotest base, the 
town farthest of any town in British occupa- 
tion from the actual seat of war. M., 
whose interview came after mine, might 
perhaps have done better for himself if he 
had not been loyal to our newly formed 
friendship. As Ruth to Naomi so he said 
to me, " Where thou goest I will go," and 
expressed his wish to the Deputy-Chaplain- 
General. This, I am sure, was an act of 
self-denial on his part, for M. has an ad- 
venturous spirit. The Deputy - Chaplain- 
General is too kind and courteous a man 
to refuse such a request. It was settled 
that M. and I should start work to- 
gether. 

We set forth on our journey at 4 
o'clock that afternoon, having first gone 
through the necessary business of inter- 
viewing the R.T.O. He was a young man 
of a most detestable kind. The R.T.O. has 
a bad name among officers who travel in 
France. He is supposed to be both uncivil 
and incompetent. My own experience is 
not very large, but I am disinclined to join 
in the general condemnation. I have come 
on R.T.O. 's who did not know their job. 



A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 43 

I have come on others wearied and harassed 
to the point at which coherent thought 
ceases to be possible. I only met one who 
deliberately tried to be insolent without 
even the excuse of knowing the work he 
was supposed to be doing. On the other 
hand I have met men of real ability en- 
gaged on military railway work, who re- 
main quietly courteous and helpful even 
when beset by stupid, fussy, and querulous 
travellers. 

M. and I struggled into a train and imme- 
diately became possessed by the idea that 
it was going the wrong way, carrying us 
to the front instead of the remote base to 
which we were bound. I do not remember 
that we were in any way vexed. We had a 
good store of provisions, thanks to my 
foresight and determination. We were in a 
fairly comfortable carriage. We were quite 
ready to make the best of things wherever 
the train took us. 

A fellow-traveller, a young officer, offered 
us comfort and advice. He had a theory 
that trains in France run round and round 
in circles, like the London Underground. 
The traveller has nothing to do but sit still 
in order to reach any station in the war 
area; would in the end get back to the 



44 A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 

station from which he started, if he sat 
still long enough. M. refused to believe 
this. He insisted on making inquiries when- 
ever the train stopped, and it stopped 
every ten minutes. His efforts did not help 
us much. The porters and station masters 
whom he hailed did not understand his 
French, and he could make nothing of their 
English. The first real light on our journey 
came to us in an odd way. At one station 
our compartment was suddenly boarded by 
three cheerful young women dressed in long 
overalls, and wearing no hats. 

44 Are you," they asked, " going to 
B. ?" 

44 Not if we can help it," I said. " But 
we may be. The place we are trying to go 
to is H." 

The young women consulted hurriedly. 

" If you're going to H.," said one, " you 
must go through B." 

A second, a more conscientious girl, cor- 
rected her. 

" At least," she said, 44 you may go 
through B." 

44 1 should think," said the third, 44 that 
through B. is as likely a way as any. Will 
you take a letter for us ? It's most im- 
portant and the post takes ages. You've 



A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 45 

only got to hand it to any of our people 
you see on the platform or drop it in at 
any of our canteens. It will be delivered all 
right." 

Who " our people " or what " our can- 
teens " might be I did not at that time 
know. It was our fellow-traveller who 
offered to take the letter. 

" I'm not exactly going to B.," he said; 
" but I expect I'll fetch up there sooner or 
later." 

The letter was given to him. The young 
women, profuse in their thanks, sprang 
from the train just as it was starting. Our 
fellow-traveller told me that our visitors 
belonged to the Y.M.C.A. I was not, even 
then, much surprised to find a Young Men's 
Christian Association run chiefly by young 
women, but I did wonder at this way of 
transmitting letters. Afterwards I came to 
realise that the Y.M.C.A. has cast a net 
over the whole war area behind the lines, 
and that its organisation is remarkably 
good. I imagine that the letter would have 
reached its destination in the end wherever 
our fellow-traveller happened to drop it. 
I suppose he took the same view. His 
responsibility as a special messenger sat 
lightly on him. 



46 A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 

" I may spend the night at B.," he said, 
" or I may get into the Paris express by 
mistake. It is very easy to get into a 
wrong train by mistake, and if I once 
get to Paris it will take me a couple 
of days to get away again. I'm not in 
any kind of hurry, and I deserve a little 
holiday." 

He did. He had been in the trenches for 
months and was on his way to somewhere 
for a course of instruction in bombing, or 
the use of trench mortars, or map-reading. 
In those days, early in 1916, the plan was 
to instruct young officers in the arts of war 
after they had practised them, successfully, 
for some time. Things are much better 
organised now. Trains are no longer boarded 
by young women with letters which they 
wish to smuggle through uncensored. It is 
difficult to get into the Paris express by 
accident. But courses of instruction are 
still, I imagine, regarded by every one, 
except the instructors, as a way of restoring 
officers who are beginning to suffer under 
the strain of life in a fighting battalion. A 
holiday frankly so-called, in Paris or else- 
where, would be better ; but a course of 
instruction is more likely to meet with the 
approval of a general. 



A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 47 

That journey of ours would have taken 
eight or ten hours in peace time. We spent 
thirty hours over it, and that was con- 
sidered good going. The theory of circulat- 
ing trains turned out to be entirely wrong. 
We changed at wayside stations, standing 
for hours on desolate platforms. We pur- 
sued trains into remote sidings in the middle 
of the night, tripping over wires and stum- 
bling among sleepers. We ate things of an 
unusual kind at odd hours. We slept by 
snatches. I shaved and washed in a tin 
mug full of water drawn from the side of 
an engine. M., indomitably cheerful, secured 
buns and apples at 6 o'clock in the morn- 
ing. He paid for the buns. I believe he 
looted the apples out of a truck in a siding 
near our carriage. 

We found ourselves at noon in a large 
town with four hours' leisure before us. An 
R.T.O. — we reported to every R.T.O. we 
could find — recommended an excellent res- 
taurant. M. shaved and washed elaborately 
in a small basin which the thoughtful pro- 
prietor had placed in the passage outside 
the dining-room door. We had a huge 
meal and made friends with a French officer 
who was attached to some of our troops as 
interpreter. He had spent two years before 



48 A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 

the war at Cambridge. There perhaps, 
more probably elsewhere, he had been taught 
that Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb are the 
most influential people in England, and 
that Mr. H. G. Wells, though not from a 
purely literary point of view a great writer, 
is the most profound philosopher in the 
world. He deeply lamented the fact that 
compulsory military service had just been 
introduced into England. 

" The last fortress of individual liberty," 
he said, " has fallen. The world is now 
militarised." 

I reminded him that Ireland still re- 
mained a free country ; but he did not 
seem consoled. He took the view that the 
Irish, though not compelled to fight, are 
an oppressed people. 

I found that interpreter an interesting 
man, though he would not talk about the 
early fighting at Charier oi where he had 
been wounded. I should much rather have 
heard about that. Lyrical eulogies of Mr. 
and Mrs. Sidney Webb seemed out of place. 
I had been " militarised " for no more than 
four days. But I already felt as if the 
world in which clever people suppose them- 
selves to think were a half-forgotten dream. 
The only reality for me was that other 



A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 4d 

world in which men, who do not profess to 
be clever, suppose themselves to be doing 
things. On the whole the soldiers, though 
they fuss a good deal, seem to have a better 
record of actual accomplishment than the 
thinkers. 

The last stage of our journey — an affair 
of some six hours — was unexciting. I think 
I should have slept through the whole of 
it if it had not been for a major, plainly a 
" dug-out " who had not gone soldiering for 
many years. He had landed from England 
a day before we did, and had, by his own 
account, been tossed about northern France 
like a shuttlecock, the different R.T.O.'s 
he dealt with being the battledores. He had 
been put into trains going the wrong way, 
dragged out of them and put into others 
which did not stop at his particular station. 
He was hungry, which he disliked ; dirty, 
which he disliked still more ; and was 
beginning to lose hope of ever reaching his 
destination. M. slept ; but then M. was 
at the far end of the compartment. The 
other three people with us were French, and 
the major could not speak their language. 
It was to me that he expressed his feelings, 
so I could not sleep. 

We reached H. at 10 p.m., almost as 
4 



50 A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 

fagged and quite as dirty as that major. 
I had already learned something. I was 
determined not to report myself to any one 
until I had washed, slept, and eaten. It 
was snowing heavily when we arrived. With 
the help of a military policeman whom we 
met we found an hotel. He told us that 
it was a first-rate place ; but he was no 
judge of hotels. It was very far from being 
good. We had, however, every reason to 
be thankful to that policeman. We secured 
two beds. While we were smoking our final 
pipes, two young officers turned up. They 
had been round all the good hotels in the 
town and failed to find accommodation. 
They failed again in our hotel. We had 
engaged the last two beds. They went off 
sadly to sleep on the platform in the railway 
station. If our policeman had known more 
about hotels and sent us to a good one, it 
might very well have been our fate to sleep 
on the platform. 

Next morning, M., who is extraordinarily 
persevering, secured a bath. It is a great 
advantage when in France not to know any 
French. M. is wholly unaffected when the 
proprietor of an hotel, the proprietor's wife, 
the head waiter, and several housemaids 
assure him with one voice that a bath is 



A JOURNEY IN THE WAR ZONE 5l 

tout a fait impossible. He merely smiles and 
says : " Very well then, bring it along or 
show me where it is." In the end he gets 
it, and, fortunate in his companionship, so 
do I. 



CHAPTER IV 

SETTLING DOWN 

There are, or used to be, people who believe 
that you can best teach a boy to swim by 
throwing him into deep water from the end 
of a pier and leaving him there. If he 
survives, he has learned to swim and the 
method has proved its value. If he drowns, 
his parents have no further anxiety about 
him. The authorities who are responsible 
for the religion of the army believe in this 
plan for teaching chaplains their business. 
Having accepted a civilian parson as a 
volunteer, they dump him down in a camp 
without instruction or advice, without even 
so much as a small red handbook on field 
tactics to guide him. There he splutters 
about, makes an ass of himself in various 
ways, and either hammers out some plan for 
getting at his job by many bitter failures, 
or subsides into the kind of man who sits 
in the mess-room with his feet on the stove, 
reading novels and smoking cigarettes — 

12 



SETTLING DOWN 53 

either learns to swim after a fashion or 
drowns unlamented. 

M., who had at all events three months' 
English experience behind him, found him- 
self on the top of a steep hill, the controller 
of a wooden church planted in the middle 
of a sea of sticky mud. He ministered to 
a curiously mixed assortment of people, 
veterinary men, instructors in all kind of 
military arts, A.S.C. men, and the men of 
a camp known as Base Horse Transport. 

The army authorities have been laughed 
at since the war began on account of their 
passion for inverting the names of things. 
You must not, if you want such a thing, 
say one pot of raspberry jam. You say, 
instead, jam, raspberry, pot, one. It is 
odd that in the few cases in which such 
inversion is really desirable the authorities 
refuse to practise it. Horse Transport, Base, 
would be intelligible after thought. Base 
Horse Transport, till you get accustomed 
to it, seems a gratuitous insult to a number 
of worthy animals, not perhaps highly bred 
but strong and active. 

Base Detail is another example of the 
same thing. To describe a man as a detail 
is bad enough. To call him a Base Detail 
must lower his self-respect, and as a rule 



54 SETTLING DOWN 

these poor fellows have done nothing to 
deserve it. A Base Details Camp contains, 
for the most part, men who have just re- 
covered from wounds received in the service 
of King and Country. " Details " perhaps 
is unavoidable, but it would surely be pos- 
sible to conform to the ordinary army 
usage and call the place Camp, Details, 
Base. 

My fate was more fortunate than M.'s. 
I had no church — he had the better of me 
there — but I was put into a homogeneous 
camp, an Infantry Base. (Our colonel was 
a masterful man. He would not have 
allowed us to be called Base Infantry.) 
There was a small permanent staff in the 
camp, the colonel, the adjutant, the doctor, 
and myself among the officers, a sergeant- 
major, an orderly-room staff, and a few 
others among the men. Every one else 
passed in and out of the camp, coming to 
us from England in drafts, or from hospitals 
as details, going from us as drafts into the 
mists of the front. Our camp occupied the 
place of a reservoir in a city's water supply. 
The men and officers flowed in to us from 
many sources, stayed a while and flowed out 
again through the conduits of troop trains 
when the insatiable fighting army, per- 



SETTLING DOWN 55 

petually using and losing men, turned on 
its taps, demanding fresh supply. 

It happened, I do not know why, that 
there had never been a chaplain specially 
attached to that camp before. I have no 
reason to suppose that a chaplain had been 
asked for or was specially desired. I ex- 
pected, at best, to be tolerated as a necessary 
evil ; at worst to be made to feel that I 
was a nuisance. 

I was, in fact, extremely kindly received. 
My experience is that a chaplain is almost 
always well received both by officers and 
men in France, and is very much less a 
stranger than a parson at home who finds 
himself in a club where he is not well known. 
But I do not pretend that my first evening 
in that mess was a particularly comfortable 
one. As it happened, neither the colonel 
nor the adjutant was there. I had as 
companions half a dozen officers, any one 
of whom was young enough to be my son. 
They were laboriously polite and appallingly 
respectful. We talked to each other in 
restrained whispers and I do not think that 
any one laughed during the whole course 
of dinner. 

My discomfort lasted far beyond that 
evening, and I do not wonder that it took me 



56 SETTLING DOWN 

some time to settle down. I came, for the 
first time in my life, under military discipline. 
I lived in a mess, a strange kind of life for 
me. I had to obey rules which I did not 
know and conform to an etiquette which 
was utterly strange to me. Looking back 
over it all now I realise that I must have 
blundered horribly, and trodden, without 
intending to, on all sorts of tender feet. 
Yet, from the moment I entered the camp 
I received nothing but kindness and con- 
sideration. 

The officers of our old army are wonderful. 
Every one, I think, agrees about this. To 
me it seems that one of the most wonderful 
things about them is the way they have 
treated civilians, amateurs, always ignorant, 
often conceited, who suddenly burst into 
their highly organised profession. Now and 
then, though rarely, I came across senior 
officers set temporarily in positions of com- 
mand who were objectionable or silly, who 
'* assumed the god " and made themselves 
ridiculous. But these were seldom regular 
soldiers. And perhaps what I resented 
arose from too much zeal, was an attempt, 
by wrong ways, to achieve a kind of dignity 
which every one respects. 

Looking back over the period of my 



SETTLING DOWN 57 

service I do not know that I met more than 
two or three of this kind, tyrants to their 
men, insolent to officers of lower rank. 
The regular soldier, who has given his life 
to his profession and has generally served 
and fought in various corners of the world, 
is amazingly considerate and helpful to 
outsiders even when they are gauche and 
awkward. 

The adjutant received me in the orderly- 
room when I reached the camp, some time 
after dark. I was as respectful as possible 
for I thought he was the colonel. Even if 
I had known him for an adjutant I should 
still have been respectful, for I like to be 
on the safe side of things and I had not the 
remotest idea what the position and functions 
of an adjutant are. I know now that he is 
something like an archdeacon, a man of 
enormous importance whose duties it is a 
little difficult to define exactly. He ex- 
pected me. With the help of the sergeant- 
major he had found a servant for me and 
assigned a hut to me. 

For the servant I have nothing but praise. 
He could and did darn socks well. Indeed 
he confided to me that when at home he 
darned his wife's stockings, being much 
better at the job than she was. He could 



58 SETTLING DOWN 

talk to French people in a language that 
was neither theirs nor his, but which they 
understood without difficulty. He was very 
punctual and he did not like the kind of 
tobacco which I smoke. His one fault was 
that he did not know whether an oil stove 
was smoking or not and could not learn. I 
am often haunted by the recollection of one 
snowy night on which I arrived at my hut 
to find the whole air inside dense with fine 
black smuts. I had to drag everything I 
possessed out of the hut into the snow. It 
took me hours to get myself clean after that 
night, and I still find traces of lampblack 
on some of the garments which suffered 
with me. 

But that inability to deal with lamps 
was my servant's one failing. In every 
other respect I was satisfied with him. I 
hope he was equally satisfied with me. He 
was at first. I know that ; for he asked 
for the congratulations of a friend on his 
appointment. " I have got a soft job at 
last," he said. " I'm an officer's servant, 
and a chaplain's at that." The job, I 
imagine, continued to be a soft one all the 
time I was in France ; but I am not sure 
that he would have said " and a chaplain's 
at that " quite so complacently the morning 



SETTLING DOWN 59 

after my scene with the oil stove in the snow 
storm. Chaplains do not, of course, swear ; 
but any one who studies the Psalms gains a 
certain command of language which can be 
used effectively and without scandal. 

For the hut I cannot say anything good. 
This was in no way the adjutant's fault. 
He had nothing else except that hut to offer 
me. It was made of brown canvas, stretched 
over a wooden frame. It was lit by small 
square patches of oiled canvas let into its 
walls at inconvenient places. It had a 
wooden door which was blown open and 
shut on windy nights and could not be 
securely fastened in either position. There 
was a corrugated-iron roof— apparently not 
part of the original plan of the hut — on which 
pouring rain made an abominable noise. 
The floor bent and swayed when walked 
on. Small objects, studs and coins, slipped 
between the boards of the floor and became 
the property of the rats which held revel 
there night and day. 

The hut was cold in winter and stiflingly 
hot in summer. Draughts whistled through 
its walls and up between its boards when 
the wind blew. On calm nights it was 
impossible to get any fresh air into it at all. 
The canvas was liable to catch fire on the 



60 SETTLING DOWN 

smallest provocation. I do not think there 
can be in the world any more detestable 
form of human habitation than huts like 
that. Mine was not unique. There were 
hundreds of them in those camps. They 
were, I am told, the invention of a man who 
succeeded in palming off these fruits of 
stupidity and malice on the War Office. 
They were called by his name. If I knew 
how to spell it I should set it down here 
for public execration. I expect he made 
a fortune out of his huts. 

My first few nights in that hut were cold 
and unhappy, for I slept on the floor in a 
" flea bag." Then, with the help of the 
quartermaster, I secured a camp bedstead 
and was much less uncomfortable. The 
quartermaster came from Galway and was 
sympathetic with a particularly helpless 
fellow-countryman. He served me out 
blankets until I was ashamed to accept 
any more. He supplied the oil stove, and 
it kept my bath water from freezing during 
the night when it could be got to burn 
without smoking. 

My servant " acquired " packing cases and 
arranged them as washstand and dressing- 
table. He hung cords like clothes lines 
across the corners of the hut and suspended 



SETTLING DOWN 61 

my kit on them. He watched the comings 
and goings of other officers and looted from 
vacant huts a whole collection of useful 
articles — a lantern which held a candle, a 
nest of pigeon-holes, three bookshelves, a 
chair without a back, a tin mug for shaving 
water, and a galvanised iron pot which made 
an excellent basin. He spent a whole morn- 
ing making and fixing up outside my door 
a wooden boot-scraper. I suppose he hoped 
in this way to prevent my covering the floor 
of the hut with mud. But the effort was 
wasted. The scraper lay down flat on its 
side whenever I touched it with my foot. 
It remained a distinguishing ornament of 
my hut, useful as a guide to any one who 
wanted to know where I lived, but no good for 
any other purpose. In this way I gradually 
became possessed of a kind of Robinson 
Crusoe outfit of household furniture. 

I cannot say that I was ever com- 
fortable in that hut. Yet the life agreed 
with me. It is evidently a mistake to sup- 
pose that damp beds, damp clothes, and 
shivering fits at night are injurious to health. 
It is most unpleasant but it is not unwhole- 
some to have to rise at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. and 
run up and down in the rain to get warm 
enough to go to sleep. 



62 SETTLING DOWN 

Yet I escaped without even a cold in my 
head. I should be most ungrateful if I 
wished any real harm to the inventor of 
those huts. But perhaps some day his 
health will give way and he will find himself 
suffering from rheumatism, congestion of 
the lungs, or frost bite. Then I hope he 
will try a winter in one of his own huts. He 
will not like it, but he will be a healthy 
man again before spring — if he is not dead. 



CHAPTER V 

KHAKI 

War must always have been a miserable 
business ; but our fathers and grandfathers 
had the sense to give it an outward semblance 
of gaiety. They went forth to battle dressed 
in the brightest colours they could find. 
They put feathers in their hats. They 
sewed gold braid on their coats. They hung 
sparkling metal about their persons. They 
had brass bands to march in front of them. 
While engaged in the business of killing 
their enemies they no doubt wallowed in 
mud, just as we do ; went hungry, sweated, 
shivered, were parched or soaked, grumbled 
and cursed. But they made a gallant effort 
at pretending to enjoy themselves. They 
valued the properties of romantic drama, 
though they must have recognised soon 
enough that the piece in which they played 
was the sordidest of tragedies. 

We are realists. Not for us the scarlet 
coats, the tossing plumes, the shining helmets 

63 



64 KHAKI 

or tall busbies. War is muddy, monotonous, 
dull, infinitely toilsome. We have staged 
it with a just appreciation of its nature. 
We have banished colour. As far as possible 
we have banished music. 

I suppose we are right. If it is really 
true that a soldier is more likely to be killed 
when wearing a scarlet coat, it is plain 
common sense to dress him in mud colour. 
If music attracts the enemy's fire, then 
bands should be left at home to play for 
nursemaids in parks and on piers. Yet 
there is something to be said for the practice 
of our ancestors. The soldier's business is 
to kill the enemy as well as to avoid being 
killed himself. Indeed killing is his first 
duty, and he only tries to avoid being killed 
for the sake of being efficient. 

A cheerful soldier is a much more effective 
fighter than a depressed soldier. Our an- 
cestors knew this and designed uniforms 
with a view to keeping up men's spirits. We 
have ignored their wisdom and decked our- 
selves in khaki. I can imagine nothing 
better calculated to depress the spirits, to 
induce despondency, and to lower vitality 
than khaki. The British soldier remains 
cheerful — indeed it is largely his unfailing 
cheerfulness which makes him the splendid 



KHAKI 65 

fighting man he is — but he has had to keep 
up his spirits without help from the authori- 
ties who have coloured his whole life khaki 
and deprived him of music. 

I was placed in a camp which was one of 
a series of camps stretching along a winding 
valley. To right and left of us were steep 
hills, and off the side of one of them, that 
on which M. lived, the grass had been 
scraped and hacked. There remained mud 
which harmonised tonelessly with our uni- 
forms. Under our feet as we walked along 
the roads and paths which led from end to 
end of the valley there was mud. The 
parade grounds — each camp had one — were 
mud. The tents were mud-coloured or dirty 
grey. The orderly-rooms, mess-rooms, re- 
creation huts and all the rest were mud 
coloured and had soiled grey roofs. Men 
mud-coloured from head to foot paraded in 
lines, marched, or strolled about or sat on 
mud banks smoking. 

Even the women who served in the can- 
teens and recreation huts refused to wear 
bright frocks, succumbing to the prevailing 
oppression of mud. The authorities have 
put even these women into khaki now, but 
that has made little difference. Before that 
order came out the ladies had failed to 
5 



66 KHAKI 

realise that it was their duty to deck them- 
selves in scarlet, green, and gold, to save the 
rest of us from depression. 

Mr. Wells went out to see the war at one 
time, and returned to make merry, rather 
ponderously, over the fact that some officers 
still wear spurs. Perhaps if Mr. Wells had 
lived for two months in a large camp wholly 
given over to the devil of khaki he would 
have taken a different view of spurs. They 
are almost the only things left in war which 
glitter. They are of incalculable value. So 
far from stripping them from the boots of 
officers supposed to be mounted, additional 
spurs should be worn on other parts of the 
uniform, on shoulder straps for instance, 
with a view to improving the spirits, and 
therefore the moral , of the army. 

It does not in the least matter that spurs 
are seldom driven into the sides of horses. 
No one now uses spurs as goads. They are 
worn for the sake of the shine and glitter of 
them. In the fortunate owner they are an 
inspiriting evidence of " swank." To every 
one else they are, as Ireland vised to be, 
" the one bright spot " in a desperately 
drab world. M., a wiser man than I, always 
wore spurs, though I do not think he ever 
used them on his horses. He was naturally 



KHAKI 67 

a man of buoyant cheerfulness, and I daresay 
would not have succumbed to khaki de- 
pression even if he had worn no spurs. But 
I think the spurs helped him. I know the 
sight of them helped me when they glittered 
on the heels of his boots as he tramped 
along, or glanced in the firelight when he 
crossed his legs in front of the mess-room 
stove. 

For a long time after settling down in 
that camp I was vaguely uneasy without 
being able to discover what was the matter 
with me. I was thoroughly healthy. I 
was well fed. I was associating with kindly 
and agreeable men. I had plenty of inter- 
esting work to do. Yet I was conscious 
of something wrong. It was not home- 
sickness, a feeling I know well and can 
recognise. It was not fear. I was as safe 
as if I had been in England. 

I discovered, by accident, that I was 
suffering from an unsatisfied yearning for 
colour. Drafts of a Scottish regiment came 
out from home wearing bright -red hackles 
in their caps ; unmistakable spots of colour 
amid our drab surroundings. I found my 
eyes following these men about the camp 
with a curious pleasure, and I realised 
that what I wanted was to see red, or 



68 KHAKI 

blue, or green, or anything else except 
khaki. 

Later on an order came out that camp 
commandants should wear coloured cap- 
bands and coloured tabs on their coat. It 
suddenly became a joy to meet a colonel. 
Certain camps flew flags in front of their 
orderly-rooms. Very often the weather had 
faded the colours, but it was a satisfaction 
to feel that once, at all events, the things 
had not been drab. The Y.M.C.A., adding 
without meaning to another to its long list 
of good deeds, kept its bright -red triangle 
before our eyes. It seems absurd to mention 
such tilings ; but I suppose that a starving 
man will count a few crumbs a feast. 

I am not a painter. If any one had 
talked to me before I went to France of the 
value of colour, I should have laughed at 
liim. Now, having lived for months without 
colour, I know better. Men want colour 
just as they want liquid and warmth. They 
are not at their best without it. 

Nothing seemed stranger to me at first, 
nothing seems more pathetic now than the 
pains which men took to introduce a little 
colour into the drab world in which we 
were condemned to live. Outside orderly- 
rooms and other important places men made 



KHAKI 69 

arrangements of coloured stones. Some- 
times a regimental crest was worked out, 
with elaborate attention to detail, in pebbles, 
painted yellow, blue, and green. Sometimes 
the stones were arranged in meaningless 
geometrical patterns. They were always 
brightly coloured. 

There was a widespread enthusiasm for 
gardening. Every square yard of unused 
mud in that great series of camps was seized 
and turned into flower-beds. Men laboured 
at them, putting in voluntarily an amount 
of work which they would have grudged 
bitterly for any other purpose. They 
wanted flowers, not vegetables, though any 
eatable green thing would have been a treat 
to them. 

When spring and early summer came to 
us we rejoiced in the result of our labours, 
frequently fantastic, sometimes as nearly 
ridiculous as flowers can be. There were 
beds of daffodils and hyacinths in which it 
was possible, when the designer acted as 
showman, to recognise regimental crests. 
The French flag came out well, if the flowers 
of the tricolour consented to bloom at the 
same time. A sergeant, who professed to 
be an expert, arranged a bed for me which 
he said would look like a Union Jack in 



70 KHAKI 

June. Unfortunately I left the place early 
in May, and I have heard nothing since 
about that Union Jack. I suppose it failed 
in some way. If it had succeeded, some 
one would have told me about it. A fellow- 
countryman of mine designed a shamrock 
in blue lobelia. The medical Red Cross 
looked well in geraniums imported from 
England at great expense. 

Generally our efforts were along more 
conventional lines. I remember a rose- 
garden with a sundial in the middle of it. 
The roses, to preserve them from frost, 
were carefully wrapped in sacking during 
severe weather, and an irreverent soldier, 
fresh from the trenches, commented on the 
fact that " These blighters at the base are 
growing sandbags." 

We were short of implements, but we dug. 
I have seen table forks and broken dinner 
knives used effectively. I have seen grass, 
when there was grass, clipped with a pair 
of scissors. Kindly people in England sent 
us out packets of seeds, but we were very 
often beaten by the names on them. We 
sowed in faith and hope, not knowing what 
manner of thing an antirrhinum might be. 

I do not believe that it was any form of 
nostalgia, any longing for home surroundings, 



KHAKI 71 

which made gardeners of the most unlikely 
of us. Heaven knows the results we 
achieved were unlike anything we had ever 
seen at home. It was not love of gardening 
which set us digging and planting. Men 
gardened in those camps who never gardened 
before, and perhaps never will again. At 
the bottom of it all was an instinctive, 
unrealised longing for colour. We knew 
that flowers, if we could only grow them, 
would not have khaki petals, that, war or 
no war, we should feast our eyes on red 
and blue. 

Newspapers and politicians used to talk 
about this as " the war to end war," the 
last war. Perhaps they were right. We 
may at least fairly hope that this is the 
world's last khaki war. It is not indeed 
likely that when men next fight they will 
revert to scarlet coats and shining breast- 
plates. We have grown out of these crude 
attempts at romanticism. 

But it is very interesting to note the 
increase of attention given to camouflage. 
It occurred to some one — the wonder is that 
it did not occur to him sooner— that a 
mud- coloured tiger, a tiger with a khaki 
skin, would be more visible, not less visible, 
than a tiger with its natural bright stripes. 



72 KHAKI 

It was our seamen who first grasped the 
importance of this truth and began to paint 
ships blue, yellow, and red, with a view to 
making it difficult for submarine commanders 
to see them. There are, I believe, a number 
of artists now engaged in drawing out colour 
schemes for steamers. I have seen a mother 
ship of hydroplanes which looked like a 
cubist picture. 

Landsmen are more conservative and 
slower to grasp new ideas. But even in my 
time in France tents were sometimes covered 
with broad curves of bright colours. They 
looked very funny near at hand ; but they 
are — this seems to be established — much less 
easily seen by airmen than white or brown 
tents. It seems a short step to take from 
colouring tents to colouring uniforms. In 
the next war, if there be a next war, regi- 
ments will perhaps move against the enemy 
gay as kingfishers and quite as difficult to 
see. Fighting men will look to each other 
like ladies in the beauty chorus of a revue. 
By the enemy they will not be seen at all. 
War will not, in its essentials, be any 
pleasanter, however we dress ourselves. 
Nothing can ever make a joy of it. But at 
least those who take part in it will escape 
the curse of khaki which lies heavily on us. 



KHAKI 73 

We suffered a good deal from want of 
music when I went out to France, though 
things were better then than they had been 
earlier. They certainly improved still 
further later on. Music in old days was 
looked upon as an important thing in war. 
The primitive savage beat drums of a rude 
kind before setting out to spear the warriors 
of the neighbouring tribes. Joshua's soldiers 
stormed Jericho with the sound of trumpets 
in their ears. Cromwell's men sang psalms 
as they went forward. Montrose's high- 
landers charged to the skirl of their bag- 
pipes. Even a pacifist would, I imagine, 
charge if a good piper played in front of him. 

Our regiments had their bands, and many 
of them their special marching tunes. But 
we somehow came to regard music as 
part of the peace-time, ornamental side of 
soldiering. The mistake was natural enough. 
Our military leaders recognised, far sooner 
than the rest of us, that this war was going 
to be a grim and desperate business. Bands 
struck them as out of place in it. Music 
was associated in their minds with promen- 
ades at seaside resorts, with dinners at 
fashionable restaurants, with ornamental 
cavalry evolutions at military tournaments. 
We were not going to France to do musical 



74 KHAKI 

rides or to stroll about the sands of Boulogne 
with pretty ladies. We were going to fight. 
Therefore, bands were better left at home. 
It was a very natural mistake to make ; but 
it was a mistake, and it is all to the credit of 
the War Office, a body which gets very little 
credit for anything, that it gradually altered 
its policy. 

At first we had no outdoor music except 
what the men produced themselves, un- 
officially, by singing, by whistling, or with 
mouth-organs. Indoors there were pianos 
in most recreation huts, and the piano 
never had a moment's rest while the huts 
were open— a proof, if any one wanted a 
proof, of the craving of the men for music. 
Then bands were started privately by the 
officers in different camps. This was a 
difficult and doubtful business. Funds had 
to be collected to buy instruments. Musi- 
cians who could play the instruments had 
to be picked out from among the men, and 
nobody knew how to find them. Hardly 
anybody stayed long in these base camps, 
and a good musician might at any moment 
be reft away and sent up the line. 

Yet bands came into existence. An Irish 
division started the first I came across, 
and it used to play its men to church on 



KHAKI 75 

Sundays in a way that cheered the rest of 
us. My friend M.'s camps on top of the 
hill started a band. Other camps, which 
could not manage bands, discovered Scottish 
pipers and set them playing on ceremonial 
occasions. Later on in another place I 
found an excellent band in a large Canadian 
hospital, and a convalescent camp started a 
band which went for route marches along 
with the men. 

But these were all voluntary efforts. The 
best that could be said for the higher 
authorities is that they did not actually 
discourage them. The regimental bands, 
which we ought to have had in France, still 
remained at home, and I do not know that 
they did much playing even there. I think 
it was the Brigade of Guards which first 
brought a band out to France. It used to 
play in the market-place of the town which 
was then G.H.Q. Later on another Guards' 
band went on tour round the different bases. 
There was no mistake about the warmth of 
its reception. The officers and men gathered 
in large numbers to listen to it on the fine 
Sunday afternoon when it played in the 
camp where I was stationed. 

Since then I have heard of, and heard, 
other regimental bands in France. Their 



76 KHAKI 

visits have been keenly appreciated. But 
we ought to have more than occasional visits 
from these bands. It is probably impossible 
to have them playing close to the firing-line. 
But it would be an enormous advantage if 
we had a couple of good regimental bands 
at every base, and especially in places where 
hospitals are numerous. 

It is a mistake to regard music simply as a 
recreation or as an " extra," outside the 
regular war programme. It is really an 
important factor in producing and maintain- 
ing that elusive but most important thing 
called moral. Men are actually braver, 
more enduring, more confident, more en- 
thusiastic, if they hear music. 

These qualities cannot be destroyed in 
our men by any privation. They are in- 
destructible in the race. But their growth 
can be stimulated, and they can be greatly 
strengthened. A hundred years ago no one 
would have doubted the value of music in 
producing and maintaining moral. Two 
hundred years ago or thereabouts Dryden 
wrote a poem which illustrated the power 
of music. Forty years ago Tolstoi wrote a 
short novel to show how a particular sonata 
affected not moral, but morality. We seem 
to have forgotten the truths familiar then. 



KHAKI 77 

There ought not to be any doubt about 
the value of music in restoring health. 
Nobody is fool enough to suppose that a 
broken bone would set itself, or fragments 
of shrapnel emerge of their own accord from 
a man's leg even if it were possible to secure 
the services of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. 
But most doctors admit that in certain 
obscure and baffling maladies, classed gener- 
ally as cases of shell-shock, mental and 
spiritual aid are at least as useful as massage 
or drugs. Next to religion — which is an 
extremely difficult thing to get or apply — 
music is probably the most powerful means 
we have of spiritual treatment. There is 
an abundant supply of it ready to hand. 
It seems a pity not to use it more freely 
than we do. 



CHAPTER VI 

LEISURE HOURS 

The problem which faces the commandant 
of a base in France, or a camp at home, 
must be very like that which a public school- 
master has to tackle. The business of 
instruction comes first. Men and officers 
must be taught their job, as schoolboys 
must be taught their lessons. Hardly less 
pressing is the problem of spare time. You 
cannot keep a soldier throwing bombs all 
day, and there is a limit to the time which 
can be occupied in route marching. The 
obvious solution of the problem is organised 
games and sports. Most men are keen 
enough on cricket and football. Most officers 
are glad to join tennis clubs. In some places 
in France there are plenty of outdoor amuse- 
ments of this kind, and matches are arranged 
between different units which keep interest 
alive. 

Where I was first stationed games were 
sternly discouraged. The theory, I think, 

78 



LEISURE HOURS 79 

was that the French people would be dis- 
gusted if they saw us playing. Perhaps 
the French people in that neighbourhood 
were more seriously minded than those in 
other parts of the country. Perhaps they 
were less friendly, and it was necessary to 
consider their feelings with particular care. 
I have no way of judging about that. Else- 
where the French seemed to take a mild 
interest in our passion for games ; but in 
that district they may very well have been 
of a different mind. 

Whether the official estimate of the French 
spirit was right or wrong, the result for us 
was that we were very badly off for outdoor 
games. Football and cricket were played, 
half-heartedly, for matches (on the plan of 
League matches at home) were not allowed. 
The formation of an officers' tennis club was 
forbidden. 

On the other hand the men were very 
well off for indoor amusements. Every 
Y.M.C.A. hut ran concerts. There were two 
large cinema huts in the camps. Boxing 
was encouraged by many officers, and inter- 
esting competitions took place which were 
eagerly watched. 

But as the days lengthened with the 
coming of spring, there were hours which 



80 LEISURE HOURS 

hung very heavily on every one. The 
officers were slightly better off than the 
men. They could always go into the neigh- 
bouring town, some four miles off, and find 
a certain amount of amusement in walking 
about the streets. But it was a singularly 
dull town. The men could not leave the 
camps without permission, and a pass was 
not always, indeed not often, attainable. 

Their favourite pastime was a game 
which they called " House," which was 
known to many of us when we were children 
as Loto. It is an exceedingly dull game, 
and I cannot believe that the men would 
have played it as they did if any other kind 
of game had been possible. There is a 
mild element of gambling about House. A 
small sum of money may be won, a very 
small sum lost. That I suppose was the 
attraction. 

But it was rather a pitiful thing to walk 
through the camps on a fine afternoon and 
to see every waste piece of ground occupied 
by House players. There is no skill what- 
ever in the game, and the players get no 
exercise. They sit on the ground with a 
pile of small pebbles before them, while one 
of them calls out a series of numbers. The 
French people, if they had seen us playing 



LEISURE HOURS 81 

House, would have come to the conclusion 
that we are a nation of imbeciles. Bad as 
it may be to have as allies men light-hearted 
enough to play cricket, it must be several 
degrees worse to have to rely on imbeciles. 
However, the French did not see us playing 
House any more than they saw us boxing or 
attending concerts. They were not allowed 
into our camps. 

For the men who did succeed in getting 
passes out of camp, the prospect was dreary 
enough, dreary or undesirable. Going into 
town in a crowded tram is an amusement 
which quickly palls. Various ill-defined por- 
tions of the town, when you got there, were 
out of bounds, and a man had need to walk 
warily if he did not want trouble with the 
military police. 

And there were worse things than military 
police. On the roadway which led to the 
camp entrance there might be seen, any fine 
Sunday afternoon, a crowd of French girls 
waiting for the men who came out. They 
were, plainly, not the best girls, though no 
doubt some of them were more silly than 
vicious. There were eating-shops, or drink- 
ing-shops, of which ugly tales were told. 
Coffee, an innocent drink, was sometimes 
doped with brandy, and men found them- 
6 



82 LEISURE HOURS 

selves half intoxicated without knowing 
that they had touched drink. 

There were, of course, places where men 
could go safely. There was, for instance, 
the Central Y.M.C.A. hall, where excellent 
food was to be had, and where there were 
books, papers, games, and a kindly welcome. 
But one Y.M.C.A. recreation hut is very like 
another, and it seems rather waste of a 
hardly-won pass out of camp to spend the 
afternoon very much as it might be spent 
without leaving camp at all. What the men 
craved for was variety, interest, and — what 
was of course almost unobtainable — the 
society of decent women. 

I cannot help feeling that in condemning 
ourselves to desperate dullness we paid too 
high a price for the good opinion of our 
French friends. If they were really shocked 
at our levity in playing games during the 
war, it would have been better to lacerate 
their feelings a little. They would very 
soon have got accustomed to our ways and 
come to regard our excitement over a League 
match as nothing worse than a curious form 
of eccentricity. 

The officers were rather better off than 
the men. They could stay in town long 
enough to dine at a restaurant, and there is 



LEISURE HOURS 88 

something rather exciting, for a short time, 
in dining at a French restaurant. There 
was a special officers' tram which brought 
us back to camp just in time to pass the 
sentries before 10.30 p.m. It was in- 
variably over-crowded and we often had 
to stand, crowded together on the platforms 
of the driver and conductor. I have seen 
officers, of rank which gave dignity, clinging 
to the back of the conductor's platform 
with their feet planted insecurely on a 
buffer. 

I remember one very exciting run home. 
We started rather late from town. There 
was a thick fog. The driver was inclined 
to be cautious, very properly ; but it was 
doubtful whether we could reach the camp 
in time. I had found a precarious place 
on the step of the driver's platform. Three 
subalterns, spirited boys, fresh from school, 
tried to speed things up by shouting, " Vite, 
Vite!" "Much viler than that!" to the 
driver, and banging violently on the gong 
which warned pedestrians of our coming. 
The driver remained unmoved and the car 
moved very slowly. Two of the boys seized 
the driver. The third took control of the 
tram. I do not know whether he had any 
practice beforehand in electric motor work ; 



84 LEISURE 7 HOURS 

m 

but he made that tram go. We rushed 
through the fog, bumping and rattling, 
making very heavy weather of the points 
at junctions. I do not think we killed any 
one. If we had we should have heard of it 
afterwards. We got back to camp in time. 
The French chauffeur when he recovered 
his first shock seemed to enjoy himself. 
Our driver was a very gallant boy. No 
risk daunted him. I hope he has been 
transferred into the Tank service. The work 
there would suit him exactly and I feel sure 
he would enjoy it. 

I do not know that even the prospect of 
returning to camp by the officers' tram 
would have lured me to dine in that town 
very often. One French hotel is very like 
another, and I had dined at many before 
the war. 

But there was one restaurant which was 
especially attractive. I should never have 
discovered it for myself, for I am not very 
adventurous or fond of exploring. It was 
situated in a slum and approached through 
an abominable alley. It was found first, 
I believe, by some A.S.C. officers permanently 
stationed in the town, who had time on their 
hands for exhaustive research. I was taken 
there by a friend who hoped to have the 



LEISURE HOUES 85 

pleasure of shocking a parson by leading 
him into the sort of place a parson ought not 
to visit. As a matter of fact the place was 
perfectly respectable, and the only part of 
me which was shocked was my nose. The 
smells in the pitch-dark gullies which led 
to that eating-house were the worst I 
encountered in France. 

It was a most unconventional restaurant. 
The proprietor, an elderly man, his wife, 
and three married daughters ran it. They 
were, whenever I entered the place, engaged 
in eating a meal of their own at a table 
near a large fire at one end of the room. 
When guests appeared they all rose, uttered 
voluble welcomes, and shook hands with 
the strangers. There were, besides the 
family table, four others, all of rough deal, 
much stained, far from clean and without 
table-cloths. The seats were narrow 
benches. If you leaned back you bumped 
the man at the next table. The floor was 
sanded and hens walked about picking up 
the fragments which the diners dropped. 
When I knew the place first it was patronised 
chiefly by sailors, Belgians, and the A.S.C. 
officers who discovered it. 

Ordering dinner was an interesting busi- 
ness. There was no menu card. Monsieur 



86 LEISURE HOURS 

and his family talked a kind of French 
which none of us could ever understand. 
Also they talked at a terrific speed and all 
at once, circling round us. We knew that they 
were naming the kinds of food available, for 
we caught words like potage and poisson now 
and then. Our plan was to sit still and nod 
occasionally. One of the daughters made 
a note of the points at which we nodded, 
and we hoped for the best. The soup was 
generally ready. Everything else was 
cooked before our eyes on the fire behind 
the family table. 

Madame did the cooking. The rest of 
the party sat down again to their own meal. 
Monsieur exhorted his wife occasionally. 
The daughters took it in turn to get up and 
bring us each course as madame finished 
cooking it. In this way we got a hot and 
excellent dinner. A good digestion was 
promoted by the long gaps between the 
courses. It was impossible to eat fast. 
Monsieur offered his guests no great choice 
in wine, but what he had was surprisingly 
good. 

When dinner was over and the bill, a 
very moderate one, paid, the whole family 
shook hands with us again and wished us 
every kind of happiness and good luck. 



LEISURE HOURS 87 

Monsieur then conducted us to a back door, 
and let us loose into an alley quite as dark 
and filthy as the one by which we entered. 
He was always firm about refusing to allow 
us to go by the way we came. I have no 
idea what his reasons were, but the plan of 
smuggling us out of the establishment gave 
us a pleasurable feeling that we had been 
breaking some law by being there. There 
is nothing that I ever could find in King's 
Regulations on the subject, so I suppose 
that if we sinned at all it must have been 
against some French municipal regulation. 

That restaurant may be quite popular 
now; it was getting better known even in 
my time. But if it becomes popular it will 
lose its charm. Monsieur and his family 
will no longer be able to shake hands with 
every guest. There may be table-cloths. 
The hens — I always thought they were the 
poulets we ate fattened before our eyes — 
will be banished, and some officious A.P.M. 
will put the place out of bounds, suspecting 
it to be a haunt of vice. Its look and its 
smell, I admit, would arouse suspicion in the 
mind of any conscientious A. P.M., but Mon- 
sieur's patrons, if rough, were respectable 
people. Even the A.S.C. officers were above 
reproach. They looked like men who were 



88 LEISURE HOURS 

satisfied at having discovered the best and 
cheapest dinner to be got in that town. 
I doubt whether they had even appreciated 
the eccentricities of the service. 

In spite of our want of games and amuse- 
ments, life in those camps was pleasant and 
cheerful. We all had work to do, and not 
too many hours of idleness. For me there 
were long walks with M., best and cheeriest 
of comrades, whose spirits and energy never 
failed or flagged. We saw a great deal of 
each other in those days until the time 
came at the end of April, when he moved 
off to a cavalry brigade ; a post into which 
he was thrust because good horsemen are 
rare among chaplains. There was always 
excellent company in my own mess and 
others. Nowhere else have I met so many 
different kinds of men. 

The regular soldiers, some of them old 
men, held themselves as a separate caste 
a little aloof from the rest of us. It is not 
to be wondered at. They were professionals, 
with a great tradition behind them. We 
were amateurs, and, at times, inclined to 
be critical of old customs and old ways. 
We came from every conceivable profession, 
and before the war had been engaged in a 
hundred different activities. Among us were 



LEISURE HOURS 89 

men of real ability, who had made good in 
their own way. I think the regular soldiers 
were a little bewildered sometimes. They, 
almost as completely as we, were plunged 
into a new world. The wonder is that they 
stood us as patiently as they did. 

We had our mild jokes, and it was wonder- 
ful how long the mildest jokes will last in 
circumstances like ours. There was a story 
of an unfortunate private who was dragged 
before his colonel for failing to salute a 
general, a general who should have been 
unmistakable. In defence he said that he 
did not know it was a general. 

" But," said the colonel, " you must have 
seen the red band round his hat." 

"Yes, sir," said the man, "but I thought 
that was to show he was a Salvation Army 
captain." 

The whole camp chuckled over that story 
for a week. Whether any one ever told it 
to the general I do not know. 

Another private, an Irishman, arrived in 
the camp one day from the firing-line. Ours 
was the remotest base; two days' journey 
from the nearest trench. Between us and 
the fighting men was what seemed an 
impassable entanglement of regulations, 
guarded at every angle by R.T.O.'s and 



90 LEISURE HOURS 

military police. It was, any one would 
agree about this, a flat impossibility for an 
unauthorised person to travel through the 
zone of the army's occupation. 

Yet this man did it, and did it without 
in the least intending to. Up to a certain 
point his account of himself was clear. He 
had been sent off, one of a party under 
charge of an officer. He did not know — 
few people in the army ever do know — 
where he was going. He became detached 
from his party and found himself, a solitary 
unit, at what seems to have been a rail- 
head. The colonel who dealt with him 
questioned : 

" Why didn't you ask the R.T.O. where 
you were to go ? " 

" I did ask him, sir. The first thing 
ever I did was to ask him." 

44 And what did he say ? " 

" What he said, sir, was ' Go to the devil 
out of this.' " 

The colonel checked a smile. He probably 
sympathised with the R.T.O. 

44 And what did you do then ? " he asked. 

44 1 got into the train, sir, and sure, here 
I am." 

That particular colonel's temper was 
notoriously a little soured by long command. 



LEISURE HOURS 91 

It was felt that the soldier had, after all, 
made a fair attempt to obey the orders of 
the R.T.O. 

Another private — less innocent, I fear — 
caused me and a few other people some 
mild excitement. I was summoned to the 
orderly-room to answer a telephone call. 
I was told by some one, whose voice sounded 
as if he was much irritated, that he had 
caught the man who stole my shirt. No 
one, thanks to my servant's vigilance, had 
stolen any shirt of mine. I said so. 

" Grey flannel shirt," said the voice, and 
I gathered that he was irritated afresh by 
my extreme stupidity. I disclaimed all 
knowledge of any stolen shirt, flannel or 
other. 

An explanation followed. A deserter had 
been arrested. It was discovered that he 
was wearing four flannel shirts and three 
thick garments under them. " That," I 
said, " is good prima facie evidence that he 
really is a soldier." I thought that a useful 
thing to say, and true. No one in the world 
except a British soldier would wear four 
shirts and three jerseys at the same time. 
The British soldier — it is one of his char- 
acteristics^ — puts on all the clothes he can 
get in any weather. 



92 LEISURE HOURS 

The voice at the other end of the wire 
swore — unnecessarily, I think. Then it told 
me that one of the shirts was marked with 
my name and that I must identify it and 
the man. I refused, of course. The voice 
offered to send the shirt round for my in- 
spection. I did not in the least want to 
inspect a shirt that had been worn, probably 
for a long time without washing, along with 
six other thick garments by a deserter ; but 
I consented to look at the thing from a 
distance. 

In the end I did not even do that. The 
unfortunate man confessed to having stolen 
the shirt from an officer in the trenches 
near Ypres. How it came to have my 
name on it I do not yet know. I did miss 
a couple of shirts from my store of civilian 
clothes when I got home. But I am sure 
no officer stole them. Indeed I do not see 
how any officer could. 

That voice — I do not know that I ever 
met its owner — had a wonderful power of 
language, strong, picturesque, and highly 
profane language, suitable for expressing 
violent emotion over a telephone wire. It 
was once rebuked by a very gentle captain 
with a remark that was widely quoted 
afterwards. The language had been un- 



LEISURE HOURS 93 

usually flamboyant and was becoming worse. 
*' Hold on a minute," said the listener, 
" and let the line cool. It's nearly red hot 
at this end." 

When life failed to provide a joke or two 
we fell back on rumours and enjoyed them 
thoroughly. They say that Fleet Street as 
a breeding-ground for rumour is surpassed 
only by the drawing-rooms of the wives of 
ministers of state. I have no experience 
of either ; but a base camp in France would 
be hard to beat. The number of naval 
battles declared by the best authorities to 
have been fought during the early months 
of 1916 was amazing. We had them once 
a week, and torpedo-boat skirmishes on off 
days. 

Men in " the signals " — all rumour goes 
back to the signals in the end — had lively 
imaginations. We mourned the loss of Kut 
months before General Townshend was forced 
to surrender. We revelled in extracts from 
the private letters of people like the Brazilian 
ambassador in Berlin. We knew with abso- 
lute certainty the English regiments which 
were taking part in the defence of Verdun. 
The Guards, by a sudden move, seized the 
city of Lille, but owing to faulty staff work 
were cut off, hemmed in, and at last wiped 



94 LEISURE HOURS 

out, the entire division. The last men, a 
mixed batch of Grenadiers, Coldstream, 
Scots, Irish, and Welsh, perished in a final 
glorious bayonet charge. It was a Guards- 
man who told me the story first, and he had 
it from what really was unimpeachable 
authority. 

But there is no reason for railing against 
Rumour. She is a wild-eyed jade, no doubt, 
with disordered locks and a babbling tongue. 
But life at a base in France would be duller 
without her ; and she does no one any real 
harm. 



CHAPTER VII 

COMING AND GOING 

The camp in which I lived was the first in 
the series of camps which stretched along 
the whole winding valley. We were nearest 
to the entrance gates, at which military 
police were perpetually on guard; nearest 
to the railway station, a wayside halte where 
few trains stopped ; nearest to the road along 
which the trams ran into the town. All 
who came and went in and out passed by our 
camp, using a road, made, I think, by our 
men originally, which ran along the bottom 
of our parade ground and thence, with many 
side roads branching from it, through all 
the camps right along the valley. Our 
parade ground sloped down towards this 
road, ending in a steep bank which we tried 
to keep pleasantly grassy, which we crowned 
with flower-beds, so that new-comers might 
feel that they had arrived at a pleasant 
place. 

95 



96 COMING AND GOING 

Standing on this bank it was possible to 
watch all the entering and departing traffic 
of the camps, the motor lorries which 
rumbled by, the little road engines, always 
somewhat comic, which puffed and snorted, 
dragging trucks after them. Now and then 
came the motors of generals and other 
potentates, or the shabby, overworked Fords 
of the Y.M.C.A. Mounted officers, colonels, 
and camp commandants who were privileged 
to keep horses, trotted by. Orderlies on 
bicycles went perilously, for the road was 
narrow and motor lorries are big. A con- 
stant stream of officers and men passed by ; 
or parties, on their way up the hill, to one 
of the instruction camps marched along. 

This went on all day from early dawn till 
the " Last Post " sounded and quiet came. 
To a new-comer, as I was, one unused to 
armies and their ways, this traffic was a 
source of endless interest ; but I liked most 
to stand on the bank above the road during 
the later hours of the forenoon. It was 
then that the new drafts, men fresh from 
England, marched in. 

The transports whichbrought them reached 
the harbour early in the morning. The men 
disembarked at 8 a.m. and marched out to 
the camps, a distance of four or five miles. 



COMING AND GOING 97 

They were often weary when they arrived, 
wet and muddy perhaps, or powdered with 
dust, unshaved, unwashed. Often their 
faces were still pallid after a long night of 
sea-sickness. Their rifles and kit seemed 
a burden to some of them. They marched 
past our camp, and there were generally two 
or three of us who stood on the bank to 
watch and criticise. 

Later on, when some of the camps had 
dealt with the music question, a band or a 
couple of pipers would go some distance 
along the road to meet the coming men and 
to play them into camp. Then, in spite of 
weariness and the effects of sea-sickness, 
the new drafts stepped out bravely and 
made a good show. 

I had a friend, a sergeant who had seen 
much service, one of those N.C.O.'s of the 
old army to whom the empire owes a debt 
which will never be properly understood. 
He often stood beside me to watch the new 
men come in. He taught me to criticise 
their marching, to appreciate their bearing. 
He wore a South African ribbon then. He 
wears the Mons ribbon now and a couple 
of gold wound stripes and doubtless several 
chevrons, red and blue. 

The skirl of pipes came to us, and a 
7 



98 COMING AND GOING 

moment later the quick, firm tread of men 
marching. 

" Guards, sir," said my friend. 

They passed, swinging along, a mixed 
draft of Grenadiers, Coldstream, Scots, 
Irish, Welsh. My friend straightened him- 
self as they went by. 

" The Guards, sir, is the Guards, wherever 
they are." 

He was not himself a guardsman, but 
there was no trace of jealousy in his voice. 
I have noticed the same thing again and 
again. There are people who dislike the 
Guards, accusing them of conceit or resent- 
ing certain privileges. I never met any 
one who refused to give the Guards first 
place in battle, on the march, in camp. It 
is a magnificent record to have established 
in an army like ours, a wonderful record to 
have kept through a long-drawn war like 
this, when every regiment has been destroyed 
and remade of new material half a dozen 
times. 

Another draft came by. 

" Territorials, sir." 

My friend was prejudiced ; but he is not 
the only soldier of the old army who is 
prejudiced against territorials. Against new 
battalions, Kitchener battalions, of regular 



COMING AND GOING 99 

regiments there is no feeling. The old army 
took them to its heart, bullied them, taught 
them as if they were younger brothers. The 
Territorials are step- brothers at best. Yet 
they have made good in France. I wonder 
that the prejudice persists. They do not 
march like the Guards. Even the London 
Territorials have not accomplished that. 
But they have established themselves as 
fighters, in the desperate holding of the Ypres 
salient in earlier days, and ever since every- 
where in the long battle-line. 

" R.F.A.," said my friend, " and the 
biggest draft of the lot. There must be a 
damned lot of guns at the front now. We 
could have done with a few more at Mons. 
It's guns that's wanted in this war. Guns 
and men behind them. And it's guns, and 
gunners anyway, we're getting. Look at 
those fellows now. You'll see worse drafts ; 
though " — he surveyed the men carefully 
— " you might see better. There's some of 
them now that's young, too young. They'll 
be sent back sick before they harden. Beg 
pardon, sir, but here's our lot at last. I 
must be going." 

He saluted and turned. A body of men 
with an elderly officer at their head followed 
the gunners closely. They turned sharp to 



100 COMING AND GOING 

the left up the steep little road which leads 
into our camp. They halted in the middle 
of the parade ground. Salutes were given 
and returned. The draft was handed over. 
The elderly officer detached himself and 
made his way to the mess-room. I followed 
to greet him, and to hear the latest news 
from England. 

44 What sort of a passage ? " 

" Vile. We crossed in a superannuated 
paddle-boat. Everybody sick. Not a spot 
to lie down in. My men were detailed to 
clean up the blessed packet afterwards. 
That's why we're late. Such a scene. Ugh ! 
Can I get a drink ? " 

I do not know any one who has a more 
consistently disagreeable job than a draft- 
conducting officer. He crosses and recrosses 
the Channel under the most uncomfortable 
conditions possible. He has a lot of re- 
sponsibility. He gets no praise and little 
credit. He is generally an elderly man. He 
has, most likely, been accustomed for years 
to an easy life. He is often an incurable 
victim to sea- sickness. There is no interest 
and no excitement about his work. He 
lives for the most part in trains and steamers. 
He snatches meals in strange messes, railway 
refreshment rooms, and quayside restaurants. 



COMING AND GOING 101 

He may have to conduct his draft all the 
way from Cork or Wick. He may be kept 
waiting hour after hour for a train. He 
may be embarked and disembarked again 
three or four times before his steamer 
actually starts. The men of his draft are 
strangers to him. He does not know whether 
his sergeants are trustworthy or not. Yet 
there is no epidemic of suicide among draft- 
conducting officers, though there very well 
might be. Great and unconquerable is the 
spirit of the British dug-out officer. 

The draft itself may have had a bad 
time too, especially in the matter of cleaning 
up the ship ; but then the draft does not 
have it once a week. And the draft has not 
got to turn round and go straight back 
again. And for the draft the business has 
the advantage of novelty. It is excit- 
ing to land for the first time in France, 
to be pursued by little boys who say 
" Souvenir ! " and " Good night! " early in 
the morning. And there is something about 
getting there at last, after months of weary 
training, which must stir the most sluggish 
imagination. 

The draft is examined by the doctors. 
One way and another a doctor in a base 
camp has a busy time of it. He begins at 



102 COMING AND GOING 

G a.m., diagnosing the cases of the men who 
report sick. The hour at which it is possible 
to report sick is fixed inconveniently early 
in order, it is hoped, to discourage disease. 
Men who are not very bad may actually 
prefer the usual parades and fatigues to 
reporting sick at 6 a.m. For sickness is not 
even a sure way of escape. Doctors have 
a nasty trick of awarding " medicine and 
duty " in doubtful cases, which is distinctly 
more unpleasant than duty without medicine. 
From that on the doctor is kept busy, till 
he drops off to sleep for half an hour before 
dinner in the mess-room. 

I thought at first that the doctors might 
have been spared the task of examining 
incoming drafts. The men have all been 
passed fit at home before they start, and it 
does not seem reasonable to suppose that 
their constitutions have seriously deterior- 
ated on the journey. But the new examina- 
tion is really necessary. Doctors, according 
to the proverb, differ. They even seem to 
differ more widely than other men. The 
home doctor for some reason takes an 
optimistic view of human ailments, and is 
inclined to pass a man fit who will certainly 
collapse when he gets up the line. The 
doctor in the base camp knows that he will 



COMING AND GOING 103 

be abominably " strafed " if he sends 
" crocks " to the front. He does not want 
them returned and left on his hands at the 
base. So he picks the plainly unfit men out 
of the drafts, and, after a tedious round of 
form filling, sends them back to England. 

There was, for instance, Private Buggins, 
whose case interested me so much that I 
should like very much to hear the end of 
his story. Private Buggins suffered from 
curvature of the spine. It was plain that 
he could not carry a pack for very long. 
Some one at home passed Private Buggins 
fit and he came out with a draft. He was 
picked out of that draft at the base in France. 
At the end of a fortnight's strenuous labour 
(form filling), Private Buggins was sent back 
to England. 

A fortnight after that he turned up again 
in France, one of another draft. Once more 
he was detached. Once more the wheels 
creaked round and Private Buggins went 
back to England. This time three weeks 
elapsed before he joined another draft and 
again submitted himself for medical examina- 
tion in France. The result was the same. 
I do not wonder. I saw Buggins' s spine 
once, and I hold strongly that " Blighty 
is the place for him." 



104 COMING AND GOING 

After that I lost sight of Private Buggins, 
for I was moved to a new camp ; but I 
have no reason to suppose the case is settled. 
He is still, in all probability, crossing and 
recrossing the English Channel. By this 
time I expect he has found out ways of 
living tolerably comfortably under the con- 
ditions of his nomadic military service. 
But he ought to be given a special medal 
when the war is over and he is allowed to 
settle down again somewhere. 

A new draft also submits to kit inspection. 
I suppose kits are inspected in England 
before the start is made ; but the British 
soldier has an amazing desire to get rid of 
the parts of his equipment which strike him 
as superfluous. He appears to shed kit as 
he goes along, and often succeeds in arriving 
at the end of the journey with only half the 
things he ought to have. 

Yet he goes to war with few possessions. 
I am sure his pack is heavy enough to carry, 
but its contents look pitifully insufficient 
when spread out on a parade ground for 
inspection. A cake of soap, a razor, a small 
towel, two or three brushes, a spare pair of 
socks, a clean shirt — it seems little enough for 
a man to face an unknown world with, a man 
who is heir to the gifts of a complex civilisation. 



COMING AND GOING 105 

Once thoroughly inspected, the draft 
ceases to be a draft, and is merged in the 
camp. The men settle down in the lines 
of their battalion, take their share in the 
life and work of their fellows until the day 
comes when they are joined to another draft 
and sent forth on a yet more adventurous 
journey. 

Drafts coming to us from England arrived 
in the morning. Drafts going from us to 
the front departed at night. I suppose 
the numbers of those who came and of those 
who went balanced like the figures in a well- 
kept ledger. To me it always seemed that 
there were more going than coming — an 
illusion certainly, since our camp never 
emptied. But those who came were all 
strangers, while many of those who went 
were friends, and many more were acquaint- 
ances. Therefore, the going left gaps which 
the new-comers did not seem to fill. 

The orders that a draft was to go to the 
front came to us in the morning from the 
Officer Commanding Reinforcements. So 
many officers and men of such-and-such a 
battalion were to proceed to such-or-such 
a place. Lists, nominal rolls, were prepared 
in the orderly-room. The men were warned. 
The officers rushed into town to complete 



106 COMING AND GOING 

their kit or add to it small articles likely to 
be useful. Trench boots, trench coats, tins 
of solidified methylated spirits, all sorts of 
odds and ends, were picked up at the ordnance 
stores or at French shopswhich dealt specially 
in such things. Advice was eagerly sought 
— and the most curious advice taken — by 
those who had never been up the line before. 
That last day at the base was busy and 
exciting. There was a spirit of light- 
heartedness and gaiety abroad. We laughed 
more than usual and joked oftener. Behind 
the laughter — who knows ? 

In the camp there was much going to and 
fro. Men stood in queues outside the 
quartermaster's stores, to receive gas masks, 
first field dressings, identification discs, and 
such things. Kits were once more inspected, 
minutely and rigorously. Missing articles 
were supplied. Entries were made in pay 
books. 

Later on the men crowded into the can- 
teen or the Y.M.C.A. hut. Letters were 
written, pathetic scrawls many of them. 
There was a feeling of excitement, tense 
and only half suppressed, among the men 
who were going. There was no sign of 
depression or fear; certainly no hint of 
any sadness of farewell. 



COMING AND GOING 107 

For us who stayed behind it was different. 
I saw scores of these drafts depart for the 
unknown, terrible front. I never got over 
the feeling of awe. There are certain scenes 
which will abide in my memory to the end 
of my life, which I do not think I can 
possibly forget even afterwards, when my 
turn comes and I join those men who went 
from us, of whom we next heard when their 
names appeared in the lists of killed. 

It was my custom to invite those who were 
going to " partake of the most comfortable 
sacrament of the body and blood of Christ " 
before they started. At first we used to 
meet in my hut ; but that was too small for 
us, though only a few from each departing 
draft gathered there. Later on I used a 
room in a neighbouring house. 

It was late in the afternoon, generally 
6 o'clock, before the officers and men 
were ready to come. The shadows had 
gathered. The candles on my rude altar 
shone, giving the little light we needed. 
About to face death these boys — to me and 
especially at that time they all seemed boys 
— kneeled to salute their King who rules 
by virtue of a sacrifice like theirs. They 
took His body and His blood, broken and 
shed for them whose bodies were also dedi- 



108 COMING AND GOING 

cated, just as His was, for the saving of the 
world. My hands trembled, stretched out 
in benediction over the bowed young heads. 
Did ever men do greater things than these ? 
Have any among the martyrs and saints of 
the church's calendar belonged more clearly 
to the great fellowship of Christs crucified, 
whose splendid destiny it is to redeem the 
world ? 

These eucharists are among the scenes 
which it is impossible ever to forget. There 
are also others, no less impressive, in the 
recurring drama of the departing drafts. 

The day closes early in these great camps. 
At half-past eight the recreation huts close 
their doors. Concerts and entertainments 
are over. The men stream back to their 
tents along muddy roads, laughing, chatting, 
singing. Lights appear in the tents, and a 
glow, red or white, shines through the canvas. 
One after another these are extinguished. 
The " Last Post " sounds from a dozen 
bugles. The multitudinous noises of camp 
life die away. The rifle-fire which has 
crackled all day on the ranges has long 
ceased. The spluttering of machine guns 
in the training camps vexes the ear no more. 
The heavy explosions of shell testing are 
over for another day. Save for the sharp 



COMING AND GOING 109 

challenge of a sentry here and there, and 
the distant shriek of a railway engine, there 
is almost unbroken silence for a while. 

At half -past nine perhaps, or a little 
later, men come silently from the tents and 
assemble on the parade ground. They fall 
in, small detachments from four or five 
regiments, each forming its own lines of 
men. They carry rifles. Their packs are 
on their backs. Their haversacks, mess 
tins, and all the kit of marching infantry 
are strung round them. A draft from this 
camp and many drafts from all this great 
collection of camps are going " up the line " 
to-night. 

" Up the line." The phrase means a 
long railway journey, very many hours of 
travelling perhaps, for the train moves 
slowly. The journey will end where the 
railway stops short of the firing-line, and 
these men will join their comrades, filling 
the gaps in many battalions. Some of 
them are fresh from home, young soldiers. 
Others, recovered from wounds or sickness, 
are going back to perils and hardship which 
they already know. For all of them this 
is the last parade in safety for many a long 
day. Henceforth, till the coming of peace 
releases them, or a wound sends them back 



110 COMING AND GOING 

to rest, or death puts an end to their soldier- 
ing, they will go in peril day and night, will 
endure incredible hardships constantly. 

They stand silent. At the head of the 
waiting columns are men with lanterns in 
their hands, faint spots of light in the sur- 
rounding gloom. Down the hill from his 
quarters the colonel comes. The adjutant 
and the sergeant-major leave the orderly- 
room. A little group of officers stands back 
in the shadow. They are there to see their 
comrades off. A sharp order is given. There 
is a rattle of arms and accoutrements. The 
waiting men stand to attention. The colonel 
makes his progress up and down the line 
of men, taking a last look at their equip- 
ment. An orderly carrying a lantern goes 
before him. He inspects each man minutely. 
Now and then he speaks a few words in a 
low tone. Otherwise the silence is com- 
plete. 

The inspection is over at last. He takes 
his place at the head of the column. Certain 
formal orders are read out by the adjutant. 
There is something about the unexpended 
portion of the day's rations. There cannot 
be much " unexpended " at 10 o'clock at 
night ; but the military machine, recklessly 
prodigal of large sums of money, is scrupu- 



COMING AND GOING 111 

lously niggardly about trifles. But it does 
not matter. No one at the moment is 
concerned about the unexpended portion 
of his ration. There is a stern injunction 
against travelling on the roof of railway 
carriages. " Men," the order explains, 
" have been killed owing to doing so." We 
suppose vaguely that those men were better 
dead. No one in his right senses would 
willingly travel on the top of a railway 
carriage at dead of night in a snowstorm. 
And as we stand on the parade ground it 
begins to snow. There is much else, but 
the reading stops at last. The colonel 
speaks. He wishes all good fortune to 
those who go. He reminds them that they 
are the guardians of the honour of famous 
regiments. He assures them that the hearts 
of those who stay behind go with them. He 
is himself one of those who stay behind ; 
but there is something in the way he speaks 
which makes us sure that he would gladly 
go. He does not say this. It is not his 
way to talk heroics. But more certainly 
than if he had said the words the men know 
that it is not of his own choice that he stays 
behind. 

It is my turn to speak, to pray. Surely 
never to any minister of God has such 



112 COMING AND GOING 

opportunity been given. But what words 
can I find ? What supplication fits the 
time and place ? I beg the men to pray, 
to seek from above courage, strength, 
patience, inward peace. I make my prayer 
for them, that God will lighten the surround- 
ing darkness and deliver us all from the 
perils of " this night." I am feeble, help- 
less, faithless, without vision ; but at least 
I can give the benediction. " The Peace 

of God " Even war cannot take that 

from the heart of him who has it. 

From a neighbouring camp comes the 
sound of men singing as they tramp down 
the muddy road. Another draft is on its 
way. From a camp still farther off we hear 
the skirl of bagpipes. There, too, men have 
said good-bye to security and are on their 
way. A sharp order rings out. Then an- 
other. The men on the parade ground spring 
to attention, turn, march. 

They begin to sing as they go. " Tip- 
perary," in those days was losing its popu- 
larity. " If I were the only boy in the 
world " had not come to its own. For the 
moment " Irish eyes are smiling " is most 
popular. It is that or some such song they 
sing, refusing even then to make obeisance 
to heroic sentiment. The little group of 



COMING AND GOING 113 

officers, the sergeants, the orderlies with the 
lanterns, stand and salute the columns as 
they pass. 

Far down the road we hear a shouted 
jest, a peal of laughter, a burst of song. 

In what mood, with what spirit does the 
soldier, the man in the ranks, go forth into 
the night to his supremely great adventure ? 
We do more than guess. We know. We 
chaplains are officers, but we are something 
more than officers. We are, or ought to be, 
the friends of men and officers alike. We 
have the chance of learning from the men's 
own lips what their feelings are. Hardly 
ever do we get the least suggestion of heroic 
resolve or hint of the consciousness of great 
purpose. Very often we hear a hope ex- 
pressed — a hope which is really a prayer for 
God's blessing. But this is almost always 
for those left at home, for wife and children, 
parents, brothers, friends. It is as if they 
and not the men who fight had dangers to 
face and trials to endure. 

From his intimate talk we may guess 
that the soldier thinks very little about 
himself and very much about those he has 
left behind. He says little of what his life 
has been, less still about that to which 
he looks forward. His mind is altogether 
8 



114 COMING AND GOING 

occupied with the little affairs of his home 
life, with the marriage of this friend, the 
wages earned by son or daughter, the thou- 
sand details of life in some English village 
or some great city. Sometimes we hear 
an expression of pleasure at the thought of 
joining again comrades by whose side the 
writer has fought. Sometimes an anticipa- 
tion from a young soldier of seeing in the 
fighting-line some friend who has gone there 
before him. 

It is not thus that an imaginative writer 
would represent the talk of soldiers who say 
farewell. I suppose that those who speak 
as these men do are lovers of peace and 
quiet ways, have no great taste for adven- 
turing, find war not a joy but a hard neces- 
sity. Yet as we know, as all Europe knows 
now, there are no better fighters in the world 
than these citizen soldiers whose blood the 
bugle stirs but sluggishly, whose hearts are 
all the time with those whom they have left 
at English firesides. 



CHAPTER VIII 

WOODBINE HUT 

I knew many recreation huts, Y.M.C.A. 
huts, Church Army huts, E.F. canteens, 
while I was in France. I was in and out of 
them at all sorts of hours. I lectured in 
them, preached in them, told stories, played 
games, and spent in the aggregate many hours 
listening to other people singing, reciting, 
lecturing. It was always a pleasure to be 
in these huts and I liked every one of them. 
But I cherish specially tender recollections 
of Woodbine Hut. It was the first I knew, 
the first I ever entered, my earliest love 
among huts. Also its name was singularly 
attractive. It is not every hut which has 
a name. Many are known simply by the 
number of the camp they belong to, and 
even those which have names make, as a 
rule, little appeal to the imagination. It 
is nice and loyal to call a hut after a princess, 
for instance, or by the name of the donor, 

115 



116 WOODBINE HUT 

or after some province or district at home, 
whose inhabitants paid for the hut. One 
is no way moved by such names. 

But Woodbine ! The name had nothing 
whatever to do with the soldier's favourite 
cigarette, though that hut, or any other, 
might very well be called after tobacco. 
I, a hardened smoker, have choked in 
the atmosphere of these huts worse than 
anywhere else, even in the cabins of small 
yachts anchored at night. But cigarettes 
were not in the mind of the ladies who built 
and named that hut. Afterwards when 
their hair and clothes reeked of a parti- 
cularly offensive kind of tobacco, it may 
have occurred to them that they were wiser 
than they knew in choosing the name Wood- 
bine. 

But at first they were not thinking of 
tobacco. They meant to make a little 
pun on their own name like the pun of the 
herald who gave " Ver non semper viret " to 
the Vernons for a motto ; associating them- 
selves thus modestly and shyly with the 
building they had given, in which they 
served. Also they meant the name to call 
up in the minds of the soldiers who used 
the hut all sorts of thoughts of home, of 
English gardens, of old-fashioned flowers, 



WOODBINE HUT 117 

of mothers' smiles and kisses — the kisses 
perhaps not always mother's. The idea is 
a pretty one, and the English soldier, like 
most cheerful people, is a sentimentalist, 
yet I doubt if ten of the many thousands of 
men who used that hut ever associated it 
with honeysuckle. 

When I first saw " Woodbine " over the 
door of that hut, the name filled me with 
astonishment. I knew of a Paradise Court 
in a grimy city slum, and a dilapidated white- 
washed house on the edge of a Connaught 
bog which has somehow got itself called 
Monte Carlo. But these misfits of names 
moved me only to mirth mingled with a 
certain sadness. " Woodbine " is a sheer 
astonishment. I hear the word and think 
of the rustic arches in cottage gardens, of 
old tree trunks climbed over by delightful 
flowers. I think of open lattice windows, 
of sweet summer air. Nothing in the whole 
long train of thought prepares me for or 
tends in any way to suggest this Woodbine. 

It is a building. In the language of the 
army — the official language — it is a hut ; 
but hardly more like the hut of civil life 
than it is like the flower from which it takes 
its name. The walls are thin wood. The 
roof is corrugated iron. It contains two 



118 WOODBINE HUT 

long, low halls. Glaring electric lights hang 
from the rafters. They must glare if they 
are to shine at all, for the air is thick with 
tobacco smoke. 

Inside the halls are gathered hundreds of 
soldiers. In one corner, that which we enter 
first, the men are sitting, packed close 
together at small tables. They turn over 
the pages of illustrated papers. They drink 
tea, cocoa, and hot milk. They eat buns 
and slices of bread-and-butter. They write 
those letters home which express so little, 
and to those who understand mean so much. 
Of the letters written home from camp, 
half at least are on paper which bear the 
stamp of the Y.M.C.A. — paper given to all 
who ask in this hut and scores of others. 
Reading, eating, drinking, writing, chatting, 
or playing draughts, everybody smokes. 
Everybody, such is the climate, reeks with 
damp. Everybody is hot. The last thing 
that the air suggests to the nose of one who 
enters is the smell of woodbine. 

In the other, the inner hall, there are 
more men, still more closely packed together, 
smoking more persistently, and the air is 
even denser. Here no one is eating, no one 
reading. Few attempt to write. The even- 
ing entertainment is about to begin. On a 



WOODBINE HUT 119 

narrow platform at one end of the hall is 
the piano. A pianist has taken possession 
of it. He has been selected by no one in 
authority, elected by no committee. He 
has occurred, emerged from the mass of 
men ; by virtue of some energy within 
him has made good his position in front of 
the instrument. He flogs the keys, and 
above the babel of talk sounds some rag-time 
melody, once popular, now forgotten or 
despised at home. Here or there a voice 
takes up the tune and sings or chants it. 

The audience begin to catch the spirit of 
the entertainment. Some one calls the name 
of Corporal Smith. A man struggles to 
his feet and leaps on to the platform. He 
is greeted with applauding cheers. There 
is a short consultation between him and the 
pianist. A tentative chord is struck. Cor- 
poral Smith nods approval and turns to the 
audience. His song begins. If it is the 
kind of song that has a chorus the audience 
shouts it and Corporal Smith conducts the 
singing with waving of his arms. 

Corporal Smith is a popular favourite. 
We know his worth as a singer, demand and 
applaud him. But there are other candi- 
dates for favour. Before the applause has 
died away, while still acknowledgments are 



120 WOODBINE HUT 

being bowed, another man takes his place 
on the platform. He is a stranger and no 
one knows what he will sing. But the 
pianist is a man of genius. Whisper to him 
the name of the song, give even a hint of 
its nature, let him guess at the kind of voice, 
bass, baritone, tenor, and he will vamp an 
accompaniment. He has his difficulties. A 
singer will start at the wrong time, will for 
a whole verse, perhaps, make noises in a 
different key ; the pianist never fails. Some- 
how, before very long, instrument and singer 
get together — more or less. 

There is no dearth of singers, no bashful 
hanging back, no waiting for polite pressure. 
Every one who can sing, or thinks he can, 
is eager to display his talent. There is 
no monotony. A boisterous comic song 
is succeeded by one about summer roses, 
autumn leaves, and the kiss of a maiden at 
a stile. The vagaries of a ventriloquist are 
a matter for roars of laughter. A song 
about the beauties of the rising moon pleases 
us all equally well. An original genius 
sings a song of his own composition, rough- 
hewn verses set to a familiar tune, about 
the difficulty of obtaining leave and the 
longing that is in all our hearts for a return 
to " Blighty, dear old Blighty." Did ever 



WOODBINE HUT 121 

men before fix such a name on the country 
for which they fight ? 

Now and again some one comes forward 
with a long narrative song, a kind of ballad 
chanted to a tune very difficult to catch. 
It is about as hard to keep track with the 
story as to pick up the tune. Words — better 
singers fail in the same way — are not easily 
distinguished, though the man does his best, 
clears his throat carefully between each 
verse and spits over the edge of the platform 
to improve his enunciation. No one objects 
to that. 

About manners and dress the audience 
is very little critical. But about the merits 
of the songs and the singers the men express 
their opinions with the utmost frankness. 
The applause is genuine, and the singer who 
wins it is under no doubt about its reality. 
The song which makes no appeal is simply 
drowned by loud talk, and the unfortunate 
singer will crack his voice in vain in an 
endeavour to regain the attention he has 
lost. 

Encores are rare, and the men are slow to 
take them. There is a man towards the 
end of the evening who wins one unmis- 
takably with an inimitable burlesque of 
11 Alice, where art thou ? " The pianist fails 



122 WOODBINE HUT 

to keep in touch with the astonishing vagaries 
of this performance, and the singer, un- 
abashed, finishes without accompaniment. 
The audience yells with delight, and con- 
tinues to yell till the singer comes forward 
again. This time he gives us a song about 
leaving home, a thing of heart-rending 
pathos, and we wail the chorus : 

" It's sad to give the last hand-shake, 
It's sad the last long kiss to take, 
It's sad to say farewell." 

The entertainment draws to its close 
about 8 o'clock. Men go to bed betimes 
who know that a bugle will sound the 
reveille at 5.30 in the morning. The end 
of the entertainment is planned to allow 
time for a final cup of tea or a glass of Hor- 
lick's Malted Milk before we go out to 
flounder through the mud to our tents. 

This last half-hour is a busy one for the 
ladies behind the counter in the outer hall. 
Long queues of men stand waiting to be 
served. Dripping cups and sticky buns are 
passed to them with inconceivable rapidity. 
The work is done at high pressure, but with 
the tea and the food the men receive some- 
thing else, something they pay no penny 
for, something the value of which to them 



WOODBINE HUT 123 

is above all measuring with pennies — the 
friendly smile, the kindly word of a woman. 
We can partly guess at what these ladies 
have given up at home to do this work — 
servile, sticky, dull work — for men who are 
neither kith nor kin to them. No one will 
ever know the amount of good they do ; 
without praise, pay, or hope of honour, often 
without thanks. If " the actions of the 
just smell sweet and blossom," surely these 
deeds of love and kindness have a fragrance 
of surpassing sweetness. 

Perhaps, after all, the hut is well named 
" Woodbine," and others might be called 
" Rose," " Violet," " Lily." The discerning 
eye sees the flowers through the mist of 
steaming tea. We catch the perfume while 
we choke in the reek of tobacco smoke, 
damp clothes, and heated bodies. 

The British part of the war area in France 
is dotted over with huts more or less like 
the " Woodbine." They are owned, I sup- 
pose, certainly run, by half a dozen different 
organisations . I understand that the Church 
Army is now very energetic in building huts, 
but when I first went to France by far the 
greater part of the work was done by the 
Y.M.C.A. 

The idea — the red triangle is supposed 



124 WOODBINE HUT 

to be symbolical — is to minister to the needs 
of the three parts of man — body, mind, and 
soul. At the bar which stands at one end 
of the hut men buy food, drink (strictly 
non-alcoholic), and tobacco. In the body 
of the room men play draughts, chess, any- 
thing except cards, read papers and write 
letters. Often there are concerts and lec- 
tures. Sometimes there are classes which 
very few men attend. So the mind is cared 
for. 

The atmosphere is supposed to be religious, 
and the men recognise the fact by refraining 
from the use of their favourite words even 
when no lady worker is within earshot. The 
talk in a Y.M.C.A. hut is sometimes loud. 
The laughter is frequent. But a young 
girl might walk about invisible among the 
men without hearing an expression which 
would shock her, so long as she remained 
inside the four walls. 

There are also supposed to be prayers every 
night and there is a voluntary service, of a 
very free and easy kind, on Sunday evenings. 
Those evening prayers, theoretically a beau- 
tiful and moving ending to the day's labour, 
were practically a very difficult business. 
I have been in huts when the first hint of 
prayers, the production of a bundle of hymn- 



WOODBINE HUT 125 

books, was the signal for a stampede of men. 
By the time the pianist was ready to play 
the hut was empty, save for two or three 
unwilling victims who had been cornered 
by an energetic lady. 

In the early days the " leader " of the hut 
was generally a young man of the kind who 
would join a Christian Association in the 
days before the war, and the lady workers, 
sometimes, but not always, were of the 
same way of thinking. They were desper- 
ately in earnest about prayers and deter- 
mined, though I think unfair ways were 
adopted, to secure congregations. A concert 
drew a crowded audience, and it seemed 
desirable to attach prayers to the last item 
of the performance so closely that there 
was no time to escape. 

I remember scenes, not without an element 
of comedy in them, but singularly unedifying. 
A young lady, prettily dressed and pleasant 
to look at, recited a poem about a certain 
41 nursie " who in the course of her pro- 
fessional duties tended one " Percy." In 
the second verse nursie fell in love with 
Percy, and, very properly, Percy with her. 
In the third verse they were married. In 
the fourth verse we came on nursie nursing 
(business here by the reciter as if holding 



126 WOODBINE HUT 

a baby) " another little Percy." The audi- 
ence shouts with laughter, yells applause, 
and wants to encore. The hut leader seizes 
his opportunity, announces prayers, and 
the men, choking down their giggles over 
nursie, find themselves singing " When I 
survey the wondrous cross." 

My own impression is that prayers cannot 
with decency follow hard on a Y.M.C.A. 
concert. The mind and soul sides of the 
red triangle seem to join at an angle which 
is particularly aggressive. The body side, 
on the other hand, works in comparatively 
comfortably with both. Tea and cake have 
long had a semi-sacramental value in some 
religious circles, and the steam of cocoa or 
hot malted milk blends easily with the hot 
air of a " Nursie — Percy " concert or the 
serener atmosphere of " Abide with Me." 

Yet I am convinced that the evening- 
prayers idea is a good one and it can be 
worked successfully for the benefit of many 
men. I have seen the large hall of one of 
those Y.M.C.A. huts well filled night after 
night for evening prayers, and those were 
not only men who remained in the hall 
drinking tea or playing games, but many 
others who came in specially for prayers. 
A choir gathered round the piano, eager to 



WOODBINE HUT 127 

sing the evening hymn. The hush during 
the saying of a few simple prayers was un- 
mistakably devotional. It was impossible 
to doubt that when the benediction fell upon 
those bowed heads there did abide some- 
thing of the peace which passeth all under- 
standing and that hearts were lifted up unto 
the Lord. 

There was, unfortunately, a certain amount 
of jealousy at one time between the Y.M.C.A. 
workers and the. recognised army chaplains. 
I think that this is passing away. But 
when I first went to France the relations 
between the two organisations in no way 
suggested the ointment which ran down 
Aaron's beard to the skirts of his garment, 
the Psalmist's symbol of the unity in which 
brethren dwelt together. 

The Y.M.C.A. workers were perhaps a 
little prickly. The men among them, often 
Free Church ministers, seemed on the look- 
out for the sort of snubs which Noncon- 
formists often receive from the Anglican 
clergy at home. The chaplains, especially 
the Church of England chaplains, appeared 
to think that they ought to conduct all 
religious services in the Y.M.C.A. huts. 
This was unreasonable. If the Church of 
England had been awake to her opportunity 



128 WOODBINE HUT 

in the early days of the war she could have 
built church huts all over northern France 
and run them on her own lines. She missed 
her chance, not having among her leaders 
any man of the energy and foresight of 
Sir A. Yapp. 

The Church Army has done much during 
the last years ; but it has been the making 
up of leeway. The Church once might have 
occupied the position held by the Y.M.C.A. 
She failed to rise to the occasion. Her 
officers, the military chaplains, had no fair 
cause of complaint when they found that 
they could not straightway enter into the 
fruits of other men's labour. 

But the little jealousy which existed 
between the chaplains and the Y.M.C.A. 
was passing away while I was in France, 
has now, perhaps, entirely disappeared. 
The war has done little good, that I ever 
could discover, to any one, but it has 
delivered the souls of the Church of England 
clergy who went out to France from the 
worst form of ecclesiastical snobbery. There 
are few of those who tried to work in the 
army who preserve the spirit of social 
superiority which has had a good deal to 
do with the dislike of the Church, which has 
been I imagine, a much more effective cause 



WOODBINE HUT 129 

of " our unhappy divisions " than any of 
the doctrines men have professed to quarrel 
about. 

And the Y.M.C.A. workers are less ag- 
gressively prickly than they used to be. 
The army authorities have weeded out a 
good many of the original men workers, 
young students from Free Church theo- 
logical colleges, and put them into khaki. 
Their places have been taken by older men, 
of much larger experience of life, less keen 
on making good the position of a particular 
religious denomination. They are often glad 
to hand over their strictly religious duties 
to any chaplain who will do them efficiently. 

The women workers, a far more numerous 
class, never were so difficult, from the 
Church of England chaplain's point of view, 
as the men. They are, in the fullest sense, 
voluntary workers. They even pay all their 
own expense, lodging, board, and travelling. 
They must be women of independent means. 
I do not know why it is, but well-off people 
are seldom as eager about emphasising 
sectarian differences as those who have to 
work for small incomes. Perhaps they have 
more chance of getting interested in other 
things. 

It is, I fear, true that the decay of the 
9 



130 WOODBINE HUT 

sectarian — that is to say undenominational 
— spirit in the Y.M.C.A. has resulted in a 
certain blurring of the " soul " side of the 
red triangle. This has been a cause of 
uneasiness to the society's authorities at 
home, and various efforts have been made 
to stimulate the spiritual work of the huts 
and to inquire into the causes of its failure. 
I am inclined to think that the matter is 
quite easily understood. There is less ag- 
gressive religiosity in Y.M.C.A. huts than 
there used to be, because the society is 
more and more drawing its workers from a 
class which instinctively shrinks from slap- 
ping a strange man heartily on the back 
and greeting him with the inquiry — " Tom- 
my, how's your soul ? " There is no need 
for anxiety about the really religious work 
of the huts. That in most places is being 
done. 



CHAPTER IX 

Y.S.C. 

" Y.S.C." stands for Young Soldiers' Club, an 
institution which had a short, but, I think, 
really useful existence in the large camp 
where I was first stationed. There were in 
that camp large numbers of boys — at one 
time nearly a thousand of them — all en- 
listed under age in the early days of the 
recruiting movement, all of them found by 
actual trial or judged beforehand to be unfit 
for the hardship of life in the trenches. 
They were either sent down from their 
battalions to the base or were stopped on 
the way up. For some time their number 
steadily increased. Like the children of 
Israel in Egypt, who also multiplied rapidly, 
they became a nuisance to the authorities. 

Their existence in the camp was a standing 
menace to discipline. Officially they were 
men to be trained, fed, lodged, if necessary 
punished according to the scheme designed 
for and in the main suitable to men. In 

1S1 



132 Y.S.C. 

reality they were boys, growing boys, some 
of them not sixteen years of age, a few — 
the thing seems almost incredible — not 
fifteen. How the recruiting authorities at 
home ever managed to send a child of less 
than fifteen out to France as a fighting man 
remains mysterious. But they did. 

These were besides boys of a certain 
particularly difficult kind. It is not your 
" good " boy who rushes to the recruiting 
office and tells a lie about his age. It is 
not the gentle, amiable, well-mannered boy 
who is so enthusiastic for adventure that 
he will leave his home and endure the 
hardships of a soldier's life for the sake of 
seeing fighting. These boys were for the 
most part young scamps, and some of them 
had all the qualities of the guttersnipe, but 
they had the makings of men in them if 
properly treated. 

The difficulty was to know how to treat 
them. No humane CO. wants to condemn 
a mischievous brat of a boy to Field Punish- 
ment No. 1. Most C.O.'s., even most ser- 
geants, know that punishment of that kind, 
however necessary for a hardened evildoer 
of mature years, is totally unsuitable for a 
boy. At the same time if any sort of dis- 
cipline is to be preserved, a boy, who must 



Y.S.C. 133 

officially be regarded as a man, cannot be 
allowed to cheek a sergeant or flatly to 
refuse to obey orders. That was the military 
difficulty. 

The social and moral difficulty was, if 
anything, worse. Those boys were totally 
useless to the army where they were, stuck 
in a large camp. They were learning all 
sorts of evil and very little good. They 
were a nuisance to the N.C.O.'s and men, 
among whom they lived, and were bullied 
accordingly. They were getting no educa- 
tion and no suitable physical training. They 
were in a straight way to be ruined instead 
of made. 

It was an Irish surgeon who realised the 
necessity for doing something for these boys 
and set about the task. I do not suppose 
that he wants his name published or his 
good deeds advertised. I shall call him J. 
He was a typical Irishman — in looks, 
manner, and character one of the most 
Irishmen I have ever met. He had a 
wonderful talent for dealing with young 
animals. The very first time I met him he 
took me to see a puppy, a large, rather 
savage-looking creature which he kept in a 
stable outside the camp. One of the crea- 
ture's four grandparents had been a wolf. 



134 Y.S.C. 

J. hoped to make the puppy a useful member 
of society. 

" I am never happy," he said, " unless I 
have some young thing to train — dog, horse, 
anything. That's the reason I'm so keen 
on doing something for these boys." 

J. had no easy job when he took up the 
cause of the boys. It was not that he had 
to struggle against active opposition. There 
was no active opposition. Every one wanted 
to help. The authorities realised that some- 
thing ought to be done. What J. was up 
against was system, the fact that he and 
the boys and the authorities and every one 
of us were parts of a machine and the wheels 
of the thing would only go round one way. 

Trying to get anything of an exceptional 
kind done in the army is like floundering in 
a trench full of sticky mud — one is inclined 
sometimes to say sticky muddle — surrounded 
by dense entanglements of barbed red-tape. 
You track authority from place to place, 
finding always that the man you want, the 
ultimate person who can actually give the 
permission you require, lies just beyond. 
If you are enormously persevering, and, 
nose to scent, you hunt on for years, you 
find yourself at last back with the man 
from whom you started, having made a full 



Y.S.C. 135 

circle of all the authorities there are. Then, 
if you like, you can start again. 

I do not know how J. managed the early 
stages of the business. He had made a 
good start long before I joined him. But 
only an Irishman, I think, could have done 
the thing at all. Only an Irishman is 
profane enough to mock at the great god 
System, the golden image before which we 
are all bidden to fall down and worship 
" what time we hear the sound of" military 
music. Only an Irishman will venture light- 
heartedly to take short cuts through regula- 
tions. It is our capacity for doing things 
the wrong way which makes us valuable 
to the Empire, and they ought to decorate 
us oftener than they do for our insubordina- 
tion. 

There was an Irishman, so I am told, in 
the very early days of the war who created 
hospital trains for our wounded by going 
about the French railways at night with an 
engine and seizing waggons, one at this 
station, one at that. He bribed the French 
station masters who happened to be awake, 
It was a lawless proceeding, but, thanks 
to him, there were hospital trains. An 
Englishman would have written letters about 
the pressing need and there would not have 



136 Y.S.C. 

been hospital trains for a long time. J. 
did nothing like that. There was no need 
for such violence. Both he and the boys 
had good friends. Every one wanted to 
help, and in the end something got done. 

A scheme of physical training was ar- 
ranged for the boys and they were placed 
under the charge of special sergeants. Their 
names were registered. I think they were 
" plotted " into a diagram and exhibited 
in curves, which was not much use to them, 
but helped to soothe the nerves of authorities. 
To the official mind anything is hallowed 
when it is reduced to curves. The boys 
underwent special medical examinations, 
were weighed and tested at regular intervals. 
Finally a club was established for them. 

At that point the Y.M.C.A. came to our 
aid. It gave us the use of one of the best 
buildings in the camp, originally meant 
for an officers' club. It was generous beyond 
hope. The house was lighted, heated, fur- 
nished, in many ways transformed, at the 
expense of the Y.M.C.A. We were supplied 
with a magic-lantern, books, games, boxing 
gloves, a piano, writing-paper, everything 
we dared to ask for. Without the help of 
the Y.M.C.A. that club could never have 
come into existence. And the association 



Y.S.C. 137 

deserves credit not only for generosity in 
material things, but for its liberal spirit. 
The club was not run according to Y.M.C.A. 
rules, and was an embarrassing changeling 
child in their nursery, just as it was a sus- 
picious innovation under the military 
system. 

We held an opening meeting, and the 
colonel — one of our most helpful friends — 
agreed to give the boys an address. I wonder 
if any other club opened quite as that one. 
In our eagerness to get to work we took 
possession of our club house before it was 
ready for us. There was no light. There 
was almost no furniture. There was no 
organisation. We had very little in the 
way of settled plan. But we had boys, 
eight or nine hundred of them, about double 
as many as the largest room in the building 
would hold. 

They were marched down from their 
various camps by sergeants. For the most 
part they arrived about an hour before the 
proper time. The sergeants, quite reason- 
ably, considered that their responsibility 
ended when the boys passed through the 
doors of the club. The boys took the view 
that at that moment their opportunity 
began. 



138 Y.S.C. 

They rioted. Every window in the place 
was shattered. Everything else breakable 
— fortunately there was not much — was 
smashed i nto small bits. A Y.M.C. A. worker, 
a young man lent to us for the occasion, 
and recommended as experienced with boys' 
clubs in London, fled to a small room and 
locked himself in. The tumult became so 
terrific that an officer of high standing and 
importance, whose office was in the neigh- 
bourhood, sent an orderly to us with threats. 
It was one of the occasions on which it is 
good to be an Irishman. We have been 
accustomed to riots all our lives, and mind 
them less than most other people. We 
know — this is a fact which Englishmen find 
it difficult to grasp — that cheerful rioters 
seldom mean to do any serious mischief. 

Yet, I think, even J.'s heart must have 
failed him a little. Very soon the colonel, 
who was to open the club with his address, 
would arrive. He was the best and staunch- 
est of friends. He had fought battles for 
the club and patiently combated the ob- 
jections in high quarters. But he did like 
order and discipline. 

It was one of our fixed principles, about 
the only fixed principle we had at first, that 
the club was to be run by moral influence, 



Y.S.C. 139 

not by means of orders and threats. Our 
loyalty to principle was never more highly 
tried. It seems almost impossible to bring 
moral influence to bear effectively when you 
cannot make yourself heard and cannot 
move about. Yet, somehow, a kind of 
order was restored ; and there was no 
uncertainty about the cheers with which 
the colonel was greeted when he entered the 
room. The boys in the other rooms who 
could not see him cheered frantically. The 
boys on the balcony, the boys standing in 
the window frames, all cheered. They 
asked nothing better than to be allowed to 
go on cheering. 

With the colonel were one or two other 
officers, our benefactor, the local head of 
the Y.M.C.A., and a solitary lady, Miss N. 
I do not know even now how she got there 
or why she came, but she was not half an 
hour in the room before we realised that 
she was the woman, the one woman in the 
whole world, for our job. Miss N. was 
born to deal with wild boys. The fiercer they 
are the more she loves them, and the wickeder 
they are the more they love her. We had 
a struggle to get Miss N. Oddly enough 
she did not at first want to come to the club, 
being at the time deeply attached to some 



140 Y.S.C. 

dock labourers among whom she worked 
in a slum near the quay. The Y.M.C.A. — 
she belonged to them — did not want to part 
with her. But we got her in the end, and 
she became mistress, mother, queen of the 
club. 

The colonel's speech was a success, a thing 
which seemed beforehand almost beyond 
hope. He told those boys the naked truth 
about themselves, what they were, what 
they had been, and what they might be. 
They listened to him. I found out later 
on that those boys would listen to straight 
talk on almost any subject, even them- 
selves. Also that they would not listen 
to speech- making of the ordinary kind. I 
sometimes wonder what will happen when 
they become grown men and acquire votes. 
How will they deal with the ordinary 
politician ? 

I cherish vivid recollections of the early 
days of the club. I think of J., patient 
and smiling, surrounded by a surging crowd 
of boys all clamouring to talk to him about 
this or that matter of deep interest to them. 
J. had an extraordinary faculty for winning 
the confidence of boys. 

There were evenings, before the electric 
light was installed and before we had any 



Y.S.C. 141 

chairs, when Miss N. sat on the floor and 
played draughts with boys by the light of 
a candle standing in its own grease. I have 
seen her towed by the skirt through the 
rooms of the club by a boy whom the others 
called " Darkie," an almost perfect specimen 
of the London gutter snipe. There was a 
day when her purse was stolen. But I think 
the rest of the club would have lynched 
the thief if they could have caught him. 

There were wild boxing bouts which went 
on in pitch darkness, after the combatants 
had trampled on the candle. There was 
one evening when I came on a boy lying 
flat on his back on the floor hammering the 
keys of the piano, our new piano, with the 
heels of his boots. The tuner told me after- 
wards that he broke seventeen strings. 

But we settled down by degrees. We 
had lectures every afternoon which were 
supposed to be — I think actually were — of 
an educative kind. Attendance at these 
lectures was compulsory. The boys were 
paraded and marched to the club. As we 
had not space in our lecture room for more 
than half our members, we had one set of 
boys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, 
another on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Satur- 
days. Each lecturer delivered himself twice. 



142 Y.S.C. 

The business of keeping up a supply of 
lectures was not so difficult as we expected. 
Officers were very kind and offered us the 
most amazing collection of subjects. The 
secretary of many a literary society at home 
would be envious of our list. We accepted 
every offer we got, no matter how inappro- 
priate the subject seemed to be. 

It was impossible to tell beforehand which 
lectures would be popular and which would 
fail. Military subjects were of course 
common. We had " The Navy " with 
lantern slides. M. gave that lecture, but 
all his best slides were banned by the censor, 
for fear, I suppose, that we might have a 
German spy among us and that he would 
telegraph to Berlin a description of a light 
cruiser if M. exhibited one upon the screen. 
We had " Men who have won the V.C." 
with lantern slides. That was, as was ex- 
pected, a success. But we also had " Napo- 
leon's Campaigns " by a Cambridge professor 
of history, illustrated by nothing better 
than a few maps drawn on a blackboard. 
To our amazement that was immensely 
popular. We had " How an Army is fed," 
by an A.S.C. officer, the only lecture which 
produced a vigorous discussion afterwards. 

But we did not confine ourselves to military 



Y.S.C. 143 

subjects. We had lectures on morals, which 
were sometimes a little confusing. One 
lecturer, I remember, starting from the 
fact that the boys had misstated their ages 
to the recruiting officers when they enlisted, 
hammered home the fact that all lies are 
disgraceful, and therefore our boys ought 
to be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. 
Another lecturer, a month later, starting 
from the same fact, took the line that it 
was possible to be splendide mendax, and 
that we had good reason to be extremely 
proud all our lives of the lie told in the 
recruiting office. 

Manners are more or less connected with 
morals, and we had lectures on manners; 
that is to say, on saluting, which is the 
beginning and ending of good manners in 
the army. A good many civilians, especially 
those of the intellectual "conchie" kind, 
are inclined to smile at the importance 
soldiers attach to saluting. Our lecturer 
convinced me — I hope he convinced the 
rest of his audience — that saluting is some- 
thing more than a piece of tiresome ritual, 
that it is the external expression of certain 
very great ideas. 

Occasionally, but not often, we were in 
difficulties about our lectures. Some one at 



144 Y.S.C. 

home sent us a present of a beautiful set of 
lantern slides, illustrating a tour in Egypt. 
They were such fine slides that it seemed a 
pity to waste them. But for a long time 
we could not find any one who knew enough 
about Egypt to attempt a verbal accompani- 
ment of the slides. 

At last we got a volunteer. He said 
frankly that he did not know half the 
places we had pictures of, but offered to do 
his best. He did exceedingly well with the 
places he did know, making the tombs of 
the ancient Pharaohs quite interesting to 
the boys. But he was a conscientious man. 
He refused to invent history to suit strange 
pictures. When anything he did not recognise 
was thrown on the screen he dismissed it 
rapidly. " This," he would say, " is another 
tomb, probably of another king," or " This 
is a camel standing beside a ruined arch- 
way." Every one was thoroughly satisfied. 

We had another set of slides which gave 
us some trouble, a series of pictures of racing 
yachts under sail. I had to take those on 
myself, and I was rather nervous. I need 
not have been. The boys in that club were 
capable of taking an interest in any subject 
under the sun. Before I got to the last 
slide the audience was ready to shout the 



Y.S.C. 145 

name of every sail on a racing cutter, and 
could tell without hesitation whether a 
yacht on a run was carrying her spinnaker 
on the port or starboard hand. They say 
that all knowledge is useful. I hope that 
it is. 

Once or twice a lecturer failed us at the 
last moment without giving us notice. Then 
J. and I had to run an entertainment of an 
instructive kind extempore. J. was strong 
on personal hygiene. He might start with 
saluting or the theft of Miss N.'s purse, our 
great club scandal, but he worked round 
in the end to soap and tooth brushes. My 
own business, if we were utterly driven 
against the wall, was to tell stories. 

The most remarkable and interesting 
lecture we ever had was given on one of 
those emergency occasions by one of our 
members. He volunteered an account of 
his experiences in the trenches. He cannot 
have been much more than seventeen years 
old, and ought never to have been in the 
trenches. He was undersized and, I should 
say, of poor physique. If the proper use 
of the letter "h " in conversation is any test 
of education, this boy must have been very 
little educated. His vocabulary was limited, 
and many of the words he did use are not 
10 



146 Y.S.C. 

to be found in dictionaries. But he stood 
on the platform and for half an hour told 
us what he had seen, endured, and felt, with 
a straightforward simplicity which was far 
more effective than any art. He disappeared 
from our midst soon afterwards, and I have 
never seen him since. I would give a good 
deal now to have a verbatim report of that 
lecture of his. 

When the lecture of the afternoon was 
over, the club amused itself. Attendance 
was no longer compulsory. Boys came and 
went as they chose. Order was maintained 
and enforced by a committee of the boys 
themselves. It met once a week, and of all 
the committees I have ever known that one 
was the most rigidly businesslike. I cannot 
imagine where the secretary gained his 
experience of the conduct of public business ; 
but his appeals to the chair when any one 
wandered from the subject under discussion 
were always made with reason, and he 
understood the difference between an amend- 
ment and a substantive resolution. 

The only difficulty we ever had with that 
committee arose from its passion for making 
rules. Our idea for the management of the 
club was to have as few rules as possible. 
The committee, if unchecked, would have 



Y.S.C. 147 

out-Heroded the War Office itself in multi- 
plying regulations. I am inclined to think 
that it is a mistake to run institutions on 
purely democratic lines, not because reason- 
able liberty would degenerate into licence, 
but because there would be no liberty at all. 
If democracy ever comes to its own, and 
the will of the people actually prevails, we 
may all find ourselves so tied up with laws 
regulating our conduct that we will wish 
ourselves back under the control of a tyrant. 

It Avas during those hours of recreation 
that Miss N. reigned over the club. She 
ran a canteen for the boys, boiling eggs, 
serving tea, cocoa, malted milk, bread-and- 
butter, and biscuits. She played games. 
She started and inspired sing-songs. She 
listened with sympathy which was quite 
unaffected to long tales of wrongs suffered, 
of woes and of joys. She was never with- 
out a crowd of boys round her, often clinging 
to her, and the offers of help she received 
must have been embarrassing to her. 

Miss N. had a little room of her own in 
the club. She furnished it very prettily, 
and we used to pretend to admire the view 
from the windows. Once we tried to per- 
suade an artist who happened to be in 
camp to make a sketch from that window. 



148 Y.S.C. 

The artist shrank from the task. The far 
background was well enough, trees on the 
side of a hill ; but the objects in the middle 
distance were a railway line and a ditch full 
of muddy water. In the foreground there 
were two incinerators, a dump of old tins, 
and a Salvation Army hut. I dare say the 
artist was right in shrinking from the 
subject. 

In that little room of hers, Miss N. had 
tea parties every day before the afternoon 
lecture. I was often there. Sometimes I 
brought M. with me. Always there were 
boys, as many as the room would hold, often 
more than it held comfortably. Pain d'epice 
is not my favourite food in ordinary life, 
but I ate it with delight in that company. 
No one, on this side of the grave, will ever 
know how much Miss N. did for those boys 
in a hundred ways. I feebly guess, because 
I know what her friendship meant to me. 
I was, I know, a trial to her. My lax church- 
manship must have shocked her. My want 
of energy must have annoyed her. But she 
remained the most loyal of fellow-workers. 

There were breakfast-parties, as well as 
tea-parties, in Miss N.'s room on Sunday 
mornings. We had a celebration of the 
Holy Communion at 6 o'clock and after- 



Y.S.C. 149 

wards we breakfasted with Miss N. The 
memory of one Sunday in particular remains 
with me. On Easter Sunday in 1915 I 
celebrated on board the Lusitania, a little 
way outside the harbour of New York, the 
congregation kneeling among the arm-chairs 
and card-tables of the great smoke-room 
on the upper deck. In 1916 I read the 
same office in the class-room of the Y.S.C, 
with a rough wooden table for an altar, a 
cross made by the camp carpenter and two 
candles for furniture, and boys, confirmed 
ten days before, they and Miss N., for 
congregation. Afterwards, in her little 
room, we had the happiest of all our parties. 
Surely our Easter eggs were good to eat. 

I have written of the members of the 
Y.S.C. as boys. They were boys, but every 
now and then one or another turned out to 
be very much a man in experience. There 
was one whom I came to know particularly 
well. He had been " up the line " and 
fought. He had been sent down because 
at the age of eighteen he could not stand 
the strain. 

I was present in our little military church 
when he was baptized, and on the same 
afternoon confirmed by Bishop Bury. I 
gave him his confirmation card and advised 



150 Y.S.C. 

him to send it home to his mother for safety. 
" I think, sir," he said, " that I would 
rather send it to my wife." He was a 
fellow-citizen of mine, born and bred in 
Belfast. We Ulster men are a forward and 
progressive people. 



CHAPTER X 

THE DAILY ROUND 

In the camp in which I was first stationed 
there was a story current which must, I 
think, have had a real foundation in fact. 
It was told in most messes, and each mess 
claimed the hero of it as belonging to its 
particular camp. It told of a man who 
believed that the place in which we were 
was being continuously and severely shelled 
by the Germans. He is reported to have 
said that war was not nearly so dangerous 
a thing as people at home believed, for our 
casualties were extraordinarily few. In- 
deed, there were no casualties at all, and the 
shelling to which he supposed himself to be 
subjected was the most futile thing imagin- 
able. 

A major, a draft-conducting officer, who 
happened to be with us one day when this 
story was told, improved on it boldly. 

44 As we marched in from the steamer 
to-day," he said, 44 we passed a large field on 

151 



152 THE DAILY ROUND 

the right of the road about a mile outside 
the camp — perhaps you know it ? " 

'* Barbed wire fence across the bottom of 
it," I said, " and then a ditch." 

" Exactly," said the major. " Well, one 
of the N.C.O.'s in my draft, quite an intelli- 
gent man, asked me whether that was the 
firing line and whether the ditch was the 
enemy's trench. He really thought the Ger- 
mans were there, a hundred yards from the 
road we were marching along." 

I daresay the original story was true 
enough. Even the major's improved ver- 
sion of it may conceivably have been true. 
The ordinary private, and indeed the ordin- 
ary officer, when he first lands in France, has 
the very vaguest idea of the geography of 
the country or the exact position of the 
place in which he finds himself. For all he 
knows he may be within a mile or two of 
Ypres. And we certainly lived in that camp 
with the sounds of war in our ears. We had 

quite near us a Perhaps even now I 

had better not say what the establishment 
was ; but there was a great deal of business 
done with shells, and guns of various sizes 
were fired all day long. In the camp we 
heard the explosions of the guns. By going 
a very little way outside the camp we could 



THE DAILY ROUND 153 

hear the whine of the shells as they flew 
through the air. We could see them burst 
near various targets on a stretch of waste 
marshy ground. 

No one could fail to be aware that shells 
were being fired in his immediate neighbour- 
hood. It was not unnatural for a man to 
suppose that they were being fired at him. 
From early morning until dusk squads of 
men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on 
two ranges. The crackling noise of rifle 
fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing 
the hill on which M. lived, we came close 
to the schools of the machine gunners, and 
could listen to the stuttering of their infer- 
nal instruments. There was another school 
near by where bombers practised their craft, 
making a great deal of noise. So far as 
sound was concerned, we really might have 
been living on some very quiet section of the 
front line. 

We were in no peril of life or limb. 
There were only two ways in which the 
enemy worried us. His submarines occasion- 
ally raided the neighbourhood of our harbour. 
Then our letters were delayed and our supply 
of English papers was cut off. And we had 
Zeppelin scares now and then. I have 
never gone through a Zeppelin raid, and 



154 THE DAILY ROUND 

do not want to. The threat was quite 
uncomfortable enough for me. 

My first experience of one of these scares 
was exciting. I had dined, well, at a hos- 
pitable mess and retired afterwards to the 
colonel's room to play bridge. There were 
four of us — the colonel, my friend J., the 
camp adjutant, and myself. On one side 
of the room stood the colonel's bed, a camp 
stretcher covered with army blankets. In 
a corner stood a washhand- stand, with a 
real earthenware basin on it. A basin of 
this sort was a luxury among us. I had a 
galvanised iron pot and was lucky. Many 
of us washed in folding canvas buckets. 
But that colonel did himself well. He had 
a stove in his room which did not smoke, 
and did give out some heat, a very rare 
kind of stove in the army. He had four 
chairs of different heights and shapes and a 
table with a dark-red table-cloth. Over our 
heads was a bright, unshaded electric light. 
Our game went pleasantly until — the colonel 
had declared two no-trumps — the light went 
out suddenly without warning. 

The camp adjutant immediately said 
nasty things about the Royal Engineers, 
who are responsible for our lights. J. sug- 
gested a Zeppelin scare. The colonel, who 



THE DAILY ROUND 155 

wanted to play out his hand, shouted for 
an orderly and light. The orderly brought 
us a miserably inefficient candle in a stable 
lantern and set it in the middle of the table. 
It was just possible to see our cards, and we 
played on. I remembered Stevenson's ship- 
wrecked crew who gambled all night on 
Medway Island by the light of a fire of 
driftwood. I thought of the men in Hardy's 
story who finished their game on the grass 
by the light of a circle of glow-worms. Our 
position was uncomfortable but picturesque. 
Another orderly came in and said that 
the camp adjutant was wanted at once in 
his office. We questioned the man and he 
confirmed J.'s fear that a Zeppelin scare was 
in full swing. The adjutant was in the 
position of dummy at the moment and could 
be spared. We played on. Then a note 
was brought to J. He was ordered to 
report at once at the camp dressing station, 
and there to stand by for casualties. The 
colonel picked up the cards and shuffled 
them thoughtfully. He meant, I think, 
to propose a game of bezique or picquet. 
But a note came for him, an order, very 
urgent, that all lights should immediately 
be extinguished. He opened the stable 
lantern and, sighing, blew out our candle. 



156 THE DAILY ROUND 

" One blessing about this Zeppelin busi- 
ness," said the colonel, " is that I don't 
have to turn out the men on parade." 

I was anxious and a little worried because 
I did not know what my duties were in a 
crisis of the kind. " I suppose," I said, 
44 that I ought to stand by somewhere till 
the show is over." I looked towards the 
colonel for advice, locating him in the dark- 
ness by the glow of his cigar. 

41 1 advise you to go to bed," he said. 
44 1 mean to. Most likely nothing will 
happen." 

I felt my way to the door. The colonel, 
taking me by the arm, guided me out of his 
camp and set me on the main road which 
led to my quarters. 

I stumbled along through thick darkness, 
bumping into things which hurt me. I was 
challenged again and again by sentries, 
alert and I think occasionally jumpy. One 
of them, I remember, refused to be satisfied 
with my reply, though I said 4t Friend " 
loudly and clearly. I have never understood 
why a mere statement of that kind made 
by a stranger in the dark should satisfy an 
intelligent sentry. But it generally does. 

This particular man — he had only landed 
from England the day before — took a serious 



THE DAILY ROUND 157 

view of his duty. For all he knew I might 
have been a Zeppelin commander, loaded 
with bombs. He ordered me to advance 
and be examined. I obeyed, of course, and 
at first thought that he was going to examine 
me thoroughly, inside and out, with a 
bayonet. That is what his attitude sug- 
gested. I was quite relieved when he 
marched me into the guard-room and paraded 
me before the sergeant. The sergeant, fortu- 
nately, recognised me and let me go. Other- 
wise I suppose I should have spent a very 
uncomfortable night in a cell. I am not 
at all sure that military law allows a prisoner's 
friends to bail him out. 

I reached my hut at last and made haste 
to get into bed. It was a most uncom- 
fortable business. I could not find my 
toothbrush. I spent a long time feeling 
about for my pyjamas. I did not dare 
even to strike a match. An hour later 
some hilarious subalterns walked along the 
whole row of huts and lobbed stones on to 
the roofs. The idea was to suggest to the 
inmates that bombs were falling in large 
numbers. It was a well-conceived scheme ; 
for the roofs of those huts were of corrugated 
iron and the stones made an abominable 
noise. But I do not think that any one was 



158 THE DAILY ROUND 

deceived. A major next door to me swore 
vehemently. 

Our French neighbours did not take much 
notice of these alarms. The row of lamps 
in the little railway station near the camp 
shone cheerfully while we were plunged in 
gloom. The inhabitants of the houses on 
the hill at the far side of the valley did not 
even take the trouble to pull down their 
window blinds. Either the French are much 
less afraid of Zeppelins than we are or they 
never heard the alarms which caused us so 
much inconvenience. These scares became 
very frequent in the early spring of 1916 and 
always worried us. 

After a while some one started a theory 
that there never had been any Zeppelins 
in our neighbourhood and that none were 
likely to come. It was possible that our 
local Head-Quarters Staff was simply playing 
tricks on us. An intelligent staff officer 
would, in time, be almost sure to think of 
starting a Zeppelin scare if he had not much 
to occupy his mind. He would defend his 
action by saying that an alarm of any kind 
keeps men alert and is good for discipline. 

But staff officers, though skilful in military 
art, are not always well up in general litera- 
ture. Ours, perhaps, had never read the 



THE DAILY ROUND 159 

" Wolf, wolf," fable, and did not anticipate 
the result of their action. As time went 
on we took less and less notice of the Zeppelin 
warnings until at last the whole thing be- 
came a joke. If a Zeppelin had come to 
us towards the end of March it would have 
had the whole benefit of all the lights which 
shone through our tents and windows, what- 
ever that guidance might be worth. 

The Zeppelins which did not come caused 
us on the whole more annoyance than the 
submarines which did. It was, of course, 
irritating when the English post did not 
arrive at the usual hour. It always did 
arrive in the end — being carried by some 
other route, though our own proper steamer 
neither went in nor out. 

But if we, the regular inhabitants of the 
place, suffered little inconvenience from the 
submarines, the officers and men who passed 
through the town on their way home on leave 
were sometimes held up for days. The con- 
gestion became acute. Beds were very diffi- 
cult to obtain. The officers' club filled up 
and the restaurants reaped a harvest. 

The authorities on these occasions behave 
in a peculiarly irritating way. They will 
not, perhaps cannot, promise that their 
steamer will sail at any particular hour or 



160 THE DAILY ROUND 

indeed on any particular day. Nor will 
they give an assurance that it will not sail. 
The eager traveller is expected to sit on his 
haversack on the quay and watch, day and 
night, lest the ship of his desire should slip 
out unknown to him. It is, of course, 
impossible for any one to do this for very 
long, and an M.L.O. — M.L.O.'s are some- 
times humane men — will drop a hint that 
the steamer will stay where she is for two 
or even four hours. Then the watchers 
make a dash for club, hotel, or restaurant, 
at their own risk, of course; the M.L.O. 
gives no kind of promise or guarantee. 

There was at that time, probably still is, 
a small shop not farfrom Base Head-Quarters 
which had over its door the words " Mary's 
Tea," in large letters. The name was an 
inspiration. It suggested " England, home, 
and beauty," everything dearest to the heart 
of the young officer in a strange land. As 
a matter of fact there was nothing English 
about the place. The cakes sold were de- 
lightfully French. The tea was unmistak- 
ably not English. The shop was run by 
five or six girls with no more than a dozen 
words of English among them. When the 
leave boat was held up " Mary's Tea "was 
crammed with young officers. 



THE DAILY ROUND 161 

I remember seeing a party of these cheery 
boys sitting down to a square meal one 
afternoon. They were still wearing their 
trench boots and fighting kit. They were 
on their way home from the front and they 
were hungry, especially hungry for cakes. 
There were four of them. " Mary " — they 
called all the girls Mary, the name of the 
shop invited that familiarity — brought them 
tea and a dish piled high with cakes, frothy 
meringues, pastry sandwiches with custard 
in the middle, highly ornamental sugary 
pieces of marzipan, all kinds of delicate 
confectionery. After the fare of the trenches 
these were dreams of delight, but not very 
satisfying. The dish was cleared. The 
spokesman, the French scholar of the party, 
demanded more. " Mary " — he did not 
translate the name into " Marie " — "encore 
gateaux, au moins trois douzaine" Mary, 
smiling, fetched another dish. I suppose 
she kept count. I did not, nor I am sure 
did the feasters. They finished those and 
repeated the encore. The au moins trois 
douzaine was a ridiculous under-estimate of 
their requirements. It might have been 
multiplied by five. 

In the end there were no more gateaux. 
The stock was sold out. It was not a large 
11 



162 THE DAILY ROUND 

shop and many others had drunk tea there 
that afternoon. The boys paid their bill 
and left, still astonishingly cheerful. I 
cannot remember whether the boat sailed 
that night or not. I hope it did. I hope 
the sea was rough. I should not like to 
think that those boys — the eldest of them 
cannot have been twenty-one — suffered from 
indigestion during their leave. Nothing 
but a stormy crossing would have saved 
them. 

If the spirit of the playing fields of our 
public schools won, as they say, our great- 
grandfathers' war, the spirit of the tuck 
shop is showing up in this one. The lessons 
learned as boys in those excellent institutions 
have been carried into France. Tea shops 
and restaurants at the bases, audacious 
estaminets near the front, witness to the fact 
that we wage war with something of the 
spirit of schoolboys with pocket money to 
spend on " grub." 

Nobody will grudge our young officers 
their boyish taste for innocent feasts. It 
is a boys' war anyway. Everything big 
and bright in it, the victories we have won, 
the cheerfulness and the enduring and the 
daring, go to the credit of the young. It is 
the older men who have done the blundering 



THE DAILY ROUND 163 

and made the muddles, whenever there have 
been blundering and muddles. 

" Mary's Tea " was for officers. The men 
were invited to " English Soldiers' Coffee." 
It, too, was a tea shop and had a good 
position in one of the main streets of the 
town. But the name was not so well 
devised as Mary's Tea. It puzzled me for 
some time and left me wondering what 
special beverage was sold inside. I dis- 
covered at last that " Coffee " was a thought- 
ful translation of Cafe, a word which might 
have been supposed to puzzle an English 
soldier, though indeed very few French 
words puzzle him for long. 

I was never inside " English Soldiers' 
Coffee." But I have no doubt it would have 
been just as popular if it had called itself a 
cafe or even an estaminet. The case of 
" Mary's Tea " was different. Its name 
made it. Half its customers would have 
passed it by if it had announced itself un- 
romantically as " Five o'clock " or " After- 
noon Tea." 



CHAPTER XI 

ANOTHER JOURNEY 

" *Tis but in vain for soldiers to complain." 
That jingle occurs over and over again in 
Wolfe Tone's autobiography. It contains 
his philosophy of life. I learned to appre- 
ciate the wisdom of it before I had been a 
week in the army. I said it over and over 
to myself. If I had kept a diary I should 
have written it as often as Wolfe Tone did. 
I had need of all its consolation when the 
time came for me to leave H. 

One evening — I was particularly busy at 
the moment in the Y.S.C. — an orderly sum- 
moned me to the chaplain's office to answer 
a telephone call. I learned that orders had 
come through for my removal from H. to 
B. I had twenty-four hours' notice. That 
is more than most men get, double as much 
as an officer gets who is sent up the line. 
Yet I felt irritated. I am getting old and 
I hate being hustled. Also I felt quite sure 

164 



ANOTHER JOURNEY 165 

that there was no need for any kind of 
hurry. 

As it appeared in the end I might just as 
well have had three or four more days 
quietly at H. and started comfortably. I 
arrived at my destination, a little breathless, 
to find I was not wanted for a week. My 
new senior chaplain was greatly surprised 
to see me. My predecessor had not given 
up the post I was to fill. There was nothing 
for me to do and nowhere for me to go. I 
spent several days, most unprofitably, in 
B. which I might have spent usefully in 
H. But this is the way things are done in 
the army, sometimes ; in the Chaplains' 
Department generally. And " 'Tis but in 
vain for soldiers to complain." 

I fully expected to make a bad start on 
my new journey. Having been fussed I 
was irritable. I had spent a long day trying 
to do twenty things in a space of time which 
would barely have sufficed for ten of them. 
I had been engaged in an intermittent 
struggle with various authorities for per- 
mission to take my servant with me, a 
matter which my colonel arranged for me 
in the end. 

I was in the worst possible mood when I 
reached the station from which I had to 



166 ANOTHER JOURNEY 

start — a large shed, very dimly lit, de- 
signed for goods traffic, not for passengers. 
Oddly enough I began to recover my temper 
the moment I entered the station. I became 
aware that the whole business of the starting 
of this great supply train was almost per- 
fectly organised, so well organised that it 
ran more smoothly, with less noise and 
agitation, than goes to the nightly starting 
of the Irish mail from Euston. 

The train itself, immensely long, was 
drawn up the whole length of the station 
and reached out for a distance unknown to 
me into the darkness beyond the station. 
There were passenger coaches and horse 
waggons. Every waggon was plainly 
labelled with the number of men to go in 
it and the name of the unit to which they 
belonged. The windows of every compart- 
ment of the passenger coaches bore the 
names of four officers. A fool could have 
been in no doubt about where he had to go. 
The fussiest traveller could have had no 
anxiety about finding a seat. Each party of 
men was drawn up opposite its own part 
of the train. The men's packs and arms 
were on the ground in front of them. They 
waited the order to take their places. Com- 
petent N.C.O.'s with lanterns walked up 



ANOTHER JOURNEY 167 

and down the whole length of the station, 
ready with advice and help when advice 
and help were needed. 

It was my good fortune that I had to 
visit in his office the R.T.O., the organ- 
ising genius of the start. My servant 
arrived at the last moment, an unexpected 
traveller for whom no provision had been 
made. The order which permitted him to 
accompany me reached him only after I 
had left the camp. I fully expected to be 
snubbed, perhaps cursed, by that R.T.O. 
I was an utterly unimportant traveller. I 
was upsetting, at the very moment of starting, 
his thought-out arrangements. He would 
have been fully justified in treating me with 
scant courtesy. 

I found him cool, collected, complete 
master of every detail. He was friendly, 
sympathetic, ready with an instant solution 
of the difficulty of my servant. He even 
apologised — surely an unnecessary apology 
— for the discomfort I was likely to suffer 
through having to spend the night in a 
compartment with three other officers. I 
do not know the name of that R.T.O. I 
wish I did. I can only hope that his abilities 
have been recognised and that he is now 
commander-in-chief of all R.T.O.'s. 



168 ANOTHER JOURNEY 

The night was not very unpleasant after 
all. My three fellow-travellers were peace- 
able men who neither snored nor kicked 
wildly when asleep. I slumbered profoundly 
and did not wake till the train came to a 
standstill on an embankment. There was 
no obvious reason why the train should 
have stopped in that particular place for half 
an hour or why it should have spent another 
three-quarters of an hour in covering the 
last mile which separated us from the station. 
But I know by experience that trains, even 
in peace time, become very leisurely in 
approaching that particular city. They 
seem to wander all round the place before 
finally settling down. 

In peace time, travelling as a tourist, one 
does not complain. The city is rich in spires 
and there are nice views to be got from the 
railway carriage windows. We got rather too 
much of those views that morning. Even 
Wordsworth, though he did write an early 
morning sonnet on Westminster Bridge, would 
not have cared to meditate on " Houses 
Asleep " for an hour and a quarter before he 
got a wash or anything to eat. 

I interviewed the R.T.O. when I reached 
the station and found that I could not 
continue my journey till 5 o'clock in the 



ANOTHER JOURNEY 169 

afternoon. I was not altogether sorry to 
have the whole day before me in a town 
which I had never visited. I recollected 
that I had a cousin stationed there and made 
up my mind to rely on him, if I could find 
him, for entertainment. 

My servant's lot was less fortunate. He 
belonged, of course, to that part of the army 
which is officially described as " other 
ranks " ; and only commissioned officers are 
trusted to wander at will through that town. 
The " other ranks " spend the day in the 
railway station. They are dependent on a 
Y.M.C.A. canteen for food and on them- 
selves for amusement. 

I spent a pleasant day, finding my cousin 
quite early and visiting with him a large 
number of churches. Some day I mean to 
work out thoroughly the connection between 
that town and Ireland and discover why 
pious Frenchmen dedicated several of their 
churches to Irish saints. 

At 4 o'clock — I like to be in good time 
for trains — I went back to the station. My 
servant was sitting patiently on my valise. 
A long train lay ready. As in the train in 
which I had travelled the night before, all 
the coaches and waggons were carefully and 
clearly labelled, but this time with the names 



170 ANOTHER JOURNEY 

of the places to which they were going. I 
went the whole length of the train and read 
every label. No single carriage was labelled 
for B., my destination. I walked all the 
way back again and read all the labels a 
second time. Then I fell back on the R.T.O. 
for guidance. I found not the man I had 
met in the morning, but a subordinate of his. 

" I'm going," I said, " or rather I hope 
to go to B. What part of the train do you 
think I ought to get into ? " 

" What does your party consist of ? " he 
asked. " How many men have you ? " 

" One," I said. " You can hardly call it 
a party at all. There's only my servant and 
myself." 

He lost all interest in me at once. I do not 
wonder. A man who is accustomed to deal 
with battalions, squadrons, and batteries 
cannot be expected to pay much attention 
to a lonely padre. quite understood his 
feelings. 

" Still," I said, " I've got to get there." 

" You can't get to B. in that train," he 
said. " It doesn't go there." 

I was not prepared to sit down under that 
rebuff without a struggle. 

" The R.T.O. who was here this morning," 
I said, " told me to travel by this train." 



ANOTHER JOURNEY 171 

" Sorry," he said. " But you can't, or 
if you do you won't get to B." 

"How am I to get there ? " I asked. 

" I don't know that you can." 

"Do you mean," I said, "that no train 
ever goes there ? " 

He considered this and replied cauti- 
ously. 

" There might be a train to-morrow," he 
said, " or next day." 

The prospect was not a pleasant one ; but 
I knew that R.T.O.'s are not infallible. 
Sometimes they have not the dimmest idea 
where trains are going. I left the office and 
wandered about the station until I found 
the officer in command of the train. He 
was a colonel, and I was, of course, a little 
nervous about addressing a colonel. But 
this colonel had kindly eyes and a sorrowful 
face. He looked like a man on whom fate 
had laid an intolerable burden. I threw 
myself on his mercy. 

" Sir," I said, " I want to go to B. I 
am ordered to report myself there. I am 
trying to take my servant with me. What 
am I to do ? " 

That colonel looked at me with a slow, 
mournful smile. 

" This train," he said, " isn't supposed 



172 ANOTHER JOURNEY 

to go to B. You can't expect me to take 
it there just to suit you ? " 

He waved his hand towards the train. It 
was enormously long. Already several hun- 
dred men were crowding into it. I could 
not expect to have the whole thing diverted 
from its proper course for my sake. I stood 
silent, looking as forlorn and helpless as I 
could. My one hope, I felt, lay in an appeal 
to that colonel's sense of pity. 

" We shall pass through T. to-morrow 
morning about 6 o'clock," he said. 

That did not help me much. I had never 
heard of T. before. But something in the 
colonel's tone encouraged me. I looked up 
and hoped that there were tears in my eyes. 

" T.," said the colonel, "is quite close 
to B. In fact it is really part of B., a sort 
of suburb." 

That seemed to me good enough. 

"Take me there," I said, "and I'll 
manage to get a taxi or something." 

" But," said the colonel, " my train does 
not stop at T. We simply pass through the 
station. But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll 
slow down as we go through. You be ready 
to jump out. Tell your servant to fling out 
your valise and jump after it. You won't 
have much time, for the platform isn't very 



ANOTHER JOURNEY 173 

long, but if you're ready and don't hesitate 
you'll be all right." 

I babbled words of gratitude. The pro- 
spect of a leap from a moving train at 6 a.m. 
was exhilarating. I might hope that I 
should find my servant and my luggage 
rolling over me on the platform when I 
reached it. Then all would be well. The 
colonel, moved to further kindness by my 
gratitude, invited me to travel in a coach 
which was specially reserved for his use. 

The art of travelling comfortably in peace 
or war lies in knowing when to bully, when 
to bribe, and when to sue. Neither bullying 
nor bribing would have got me to B. If I 
had relied on those methods I should not 
have arrived there for days, should perhaps 
never have arrived there, should certainly 
have been most uncomfortable. By assum- 
ing the manner, and as far as possible the 
appearance, of a small child lost in London 
I moved the pity of the only man who could 
have helped me. But those circumstances 
were exceptional. As a general rule I think 
bullying and bribing are better ways of 
getting what you want on a journey. 

I travelled in great comfort. There were 
three of us — the colonel, a colonial commis- 
sioner, in uniform but otherwise uncon- 



174 ANOTHER JOURNEY 

nected with the army, and myself. There 
was also the colonel's servant, who cooked 
a dinner for us on a Primus stove. 

The train stopped frequently at wayside 
stations. There was no conceivable reason 
why it should have stopped at all. We 
neither discharged nor took up any pas- 
sengers. But the halts were a source of 
entertainment for the men. Most of them 
and all the officers got out every time the 
train stopped. It was the duty of the 
colonel, as O.C. Train, to see that they all 
got in again. 

It was a laborious job, not unlike that of 
a sheep dog. The colonial commissioner and 
I tried to help. I do not think we were 
much use. But I have this to my credit. I 
carried a message to the engine driver and 
told him to whistle loud and long before he 
started. Having read long ago Matthew 
Arnold's Essav on Heine, I know the French 
for " whistle " or a word which conveyed 
the idea of whistling to the engine driver. 

When it became dark the worst of this 
labour was over for the colonel. The men 
stayed in their carriages. I suppose they 
went to sleep. We dined. It was a pleasant 
and satisfying meal. We all contributed 
to it. The colonel's servant produced soup, 



ANOTHER JOURNEY 175 

hot and strong, tasting slightly of catsup, 
made out of small packets of powder labelled 
" Oxtail." Then we had bully beef — perhaps 
the '* unexpended portion " of the colonel's 
servant's day's rations — and sandwiches, 
which I contributed. By way of pudding 
we had bread and marmalade. The colonial 
commissioner produced the marmalade from 
his haversack. I had some cheese, a Camem- 
bert, and the colonel's servant brought us 
sardines on toast, and coffee. We all had 
flasks and the colonel kept a supply of 
Perrier water. Men have fared worse on 
supply trains. 

After dinner I taught the colonel and the 
commissioner to play my favourite kind of 
patience. I do not suppose the game was 
ever much use to the commissioner. In his 
colony life is a strenuous business. But I 
like to think that I did the colonel a good 
turn. His business was to travel up to the 
rail head in supply trains full of men, and 
then to travel down again in the same train 
empty. When I realised that he had been 
at this work for months and expected to be 
at it for years I understood why he looked 
depressed. Train co umanding must be a 
horrible business, only one degree better 
than draft conducting. To a man engaged 



176 ANOTHER JOURNEY 

in it a really absorbing kind of patience 
must be a boon. 

The next morning the colonel woke me 
early and warned me to be ready for my 
leap. In due time he set me on the step of 
the carriage. He took all my coats, rugs, 
and sticks from me. The train slowed down. 
I caught sight of the platform. The colonel 
said " Now." I jumped. My coats and 
rugs fell round me in a shower. My servant 
timed the thing well. My valise came to 
earth at one end of the platform. The man's 
own kit fell close to me. He himself lit 
on his feet at the far end of the platform. 
The train gathered speed again. I waved a 
farewell to my benefactor and the colonial 
commissioner. 



CHAPTER XII 

MADAME 

Madame was certainly an old woman, if 
age is counted by years. She had celebrated 
her golden wedding before the war began. 
But in heart she was young, a girl. 

I cherish, among many, one special picture 
of Madame. It was a fine, warm afternoon 
in early summer. The fountain at the lower 
end of the garden spouted its little jet into 
the air. Madame loved the fountain, and 
set it working on all festive occasions and 
whenever she felt particularly cheerful. I 
think she liked to hear the water splashing 
among the water-lily leaves in the stone 
basin where the goldfish swam. Behind the 
fountain the flowers were gay and the fruit 
trees pleasantly green round a marvellous 
terra-cotta figure, life-size, of an ancient 
warrior. Below the fountain was a square, 
paved court, sunlit, well warmed. 

Madame sat in a wicker chair, her back 
to the closed green jalousies of the dining- 
12 «' 



178 MADAME 

room window. Beside her was her workbox. 
On her knees was a spread of white linen. 
Madame held it a sacred duty visiter la 
linge once a week ; and no tear remained 
undarned or hole unpatched for very long. 
As she sewed she sang, in a thin, high 
voice, the gayest little songs, full of un- 
expected trills and little passages of dancing 
melody. 

Madame was mistress. There was no 
mistake about that. Monsieur was a retired 
business man who had fought under General 
Faidherbe in the Franco-Prussian war. He 
was older than Madame, a very patient, 
quiet gentleman. He was a little deaf, 
which was an advantage to him, for Madame 
scolded him sometimes. He read newspapers 
diligently, tended the pear trees in the 
garden, and did messages for Madame. 

There was also Marie, a distant cousin of 
Monsieur's, herself the owner of a small 
farm in Brittany, who was — I know no term 
which expresses her place in the household. 
She was neither servant nor guest, and in 
no way the least like what I imagine a 
" lady-help " to be. She was older than 
Madame, older, I fancy, even than Monsieur, 
and she went to Mass every morning. 
Madame was more moderate in her religion. 



MADAME 179 

Monsieur, I think, was, or once had been, 
a little anti- clerical. 

Madame was the most tender-hearted 
woman I have ever met. She loved all 
living things, even an atrocious little dog 
called Fifi, half blind, wholly deaf, and 
given to wheezing horribly. Only once did 
I see her really angry. A neighbour went 
away from home for two days, leaving a 
dog tied up without food or water in his 
yard. We climbed the wall and, with im- 
mense difficulty, brought the creature to 
Madame. She trembled with passion while 
she fed it. She would have done bodily 
harm to the owner if she could. 

She did not even hate Germans. Some- 
times at our midday meal Monsieur would 
read from the paper an account of heavy 
German casualties or an estimate of the sum 
total of German losses. He chuckled. So 
many more dead Boches. So much the 
better for the world. But Madame always 
sighed. " Les pauvres gar cons" she said. 
" C'est terrible, terrible." Then perhaps 
Monsieur, good patriot, asserted himself 
and declared that the Boche was better 
dead. And Madame scolded him for his 
inhumanity. Our own wounded — les pauvres 
blesses — we mentioned as little as possible. 



180 MADAME 

Madame wept at the thought of them, and 
it was not pleasant to see tears in her bright 
old eyes. 

But for all her tender-heartedness Madame 
did not, so far as I ever could discover, do 
much for the men of her own nation or of 
ours. An Englishwoman, in her position 
and with her vitality, would have sat on 
half a dozen committees, would have made 
bandages at a War Work Depot, or packed 
parcels for prisoners ; would certainly have 
knitted socks all day. Madame did no such 
things. She managed her own house, mended 
her own linen, and she darned my socks — 
which was I suppose, a kind of war work, 
since I wore uniform. 

The activities of Englishwomen rather 
scandalised her. The town was full of 
nurses, V.A.D.'s, and canteen workers. 
Madame was too charitable to criticise, but 
I think she regarded the jeune pile Anglaise 
as unbecomingly emancipated. She would 
have been sorry to see her own nieces — 
Madame had many nieces, but no child of 
her own — occupied as the English girls were. 

I have always wondered why Madame 
took English officers to board in her house. 
She did not want the money we paid her, 
for she and Monsieur were well off. Indeed 



MADAME 181 

she asked so little of us, and fed us so well, 
that she cannot possibly have made a profit. 
And we must have been a nuisance to her. 

In England Madame would have been 
called " house proud." She loved every 
stick of her fine old-fashioned furniture, 
Polishing of stairs and floors was a joy to 
her. We tramped in and out in muddy 
boots. We scattered tobacco ashes. We 
opened bedroom windows, even on wet 
nights, and rain came in. We used mon- 
strous and unheard-of quantities of water. 
Yet no sooner had one guest departed than 
Madame grew impatient to receive another. 

On one point alone Madame was obstin- 
ate. She objected in the strongest way to 
baths in bedrooms. As there was no bath- 
room in the house, this raised a difficulty. 
Madame's own practice — she once explained 
it to me — was to take her bath on the 
evening of the first Monday in every month — 
in the kitchen, I think. My predecessors 
and my contemporaries refused to be satis- 
fied without baths. Madame compromised. 
If they wanted baths they must descend to 
le cave, a deep underground cellar where 
Monsieur kept wine. 

I, and I believe I alone of all Madame's 
guests, defeated her. I should like to be- 



182 MADAME 

lieve that she gave in to me because she 
loved me ; but I fear that I won my victory 
by unfair means. I refused to understand 
one word that Madame said, either in French 
or English, about baths. I treated the 
subject in language which I am sure was 
dark to her. I owned a bath of my own 
and gave my servant orders to bring up 
sufficient water every morning, whatever 
Madame said. He obeyed me, and I washed 
myself, more or less. Madame took her 
defeat well. She collected quantities of old 
blankets, rugs, sacks, and bed quilts. She 
spread them over the parts of the floor 
where my bath was placed. I tried, honour- 
ably, to splash as little as possible and 
always stood on a towel while drying myself. 
After all Madame had reason on. her side. 
Water is bad for polished floors, and it is 
very doubtful whether the human skin is 
any the better for it. Most of our rules of 
hygiene are foolish. We think a daily bath 
is wholesome. We clamour for fresh air. 
We fuss about drains. Madame never opened 
a window and had a horror of a courant 
d-'air: The only drain connected with the 
house ran into the well from which our 
drinking water came. Yet Madame had 
celebrated her golden wedding and was 



MADAME 183 

never ill. Monsieur and Marie were even 
older and could still thoroughly enjoy a jour 
de fete. 

Madame had a high sense of duty towards 
her guests. She and Marie cooked wonder- 
ful meals for us and even made pathetic 
efforts to produce le pudding, a thing strange 
to them which they were convinced we 
loved. She mended our clothes and sewed 
on buttons. She pressed us, anxiously, to 
remain tranqnille for a proper period after 
meals. 

She did her best to teach us French. She 
tried to induce me — she actually had induced 
one of my predecessors — to write French 
exercises in the evenings. She made a 
stringent rule that no word of English was 
ever to be spoken at meals. I think that 
this was a real self-denial to Madame. She 
knew a little English — picked up sixty 
years before when she spent one term in a 
school near Folkestone. She liked to air 
it ; but for the sake of our education she 
denied herself. We used to sit at dinner 
with a dictionary — English-French and 
French-English — on the table. We referred 
to it when stuck, and on the whole we got 
on well in every respect except one. 

Madame had an eager desire to understand 



184 MADAME 

and appreciate English jokes, and of all 
things a joke is the most difficult to translate. 
A fellow-lodger once incautiously repeated 
to me a joke which he had read in a paper. 
It ran thus : " First British Soldier (in a 
French Restaurant) : * Waiter, this 'am's 
'igh. 'Igh 'am. Compris?' Second British 
Soldier : 4 You leave it to me, Bill. I know 
the lingo. Gar con, Je suis.' " 

I laughed. Madame looked at me and 
at W., my fellow-lodger, and demanded 
a translation of the joke. I referred the 
matter to W. His French was, if possible, 
worse than mine, but it was he who had 
started the subject. " Ham," I said to 
him, " is jambon. Go ahead." W. went 
ahead, but " high " in the sense he wanted 
did not seem to be in the dictionary. I had 
a try when W. gave up and began with an 
explanation of the cockney's difficulty with 
the letter " h." Madame smiled uncompre- 
hendingly. W., who had studied the dic- 
tionary while I talked, made a fresh start at 
" je suis." " Je suis — I am. Jambon — 
ham, c*est a dire * 'am ' a Londres." We 
worked away all through that meal. At 
supper, Madame, still full of curiosity, set 
us at it again. 

We pursued that joke for several days 



MADAME 185 

until we were all exhausted, and Madame, 
politely, said she saw the point, though she 
did not and never will. I do not believe 
that joke can be translated into French. 
Months afterwards I had as fellow-lodger a 
man who spoke French well and fluently. 
I urged him to try if he could make Madame 
understand. He failed. 

Madame was most hospitable. She was 
neither worried nor cross when we asked 
friends to dine with us. Indeed she was 
pleased. But she liked due notice so that 
she could devote proper attention to la 
cuisine. 

M., who was at that time with a cavalry 
brigade, used to come and spend a night or 
two with me sometimes. He was a special 
favourite with Madame and she used to try 
to load him with food when he was leaving. 
One very wet day in late autumn, Madame 
produced a large brown-paper bag and filled 
it with pears. She presented it to M. with 
a pretty speech of which he did not under- 
stand a word. M. was seriously embar- 
rassed. He liked Madame and did not 
want to hurt her feelings ; but he had before 
him a railway journey of some hours and 
then five miles on horseback. It is im- 
possible to carry a brown-paper bag full of 



186 MADAME 

pears on a horse through a downpour of 
rain. The bag gets sopped at once and 
the pears fall through it. M. pushed the 
bag back to Madame. 

" Merci, merci" he said. " Mais non, 
pas possible." 

Madame explained that the pears were 
deliciously ripe, which was true. 

M. said, " A cheval, Madame, je voyage a 
cheval." 

Madame pushed the bag into his hands. 
He turned to me. 

" For goodness' sake explain to her — 
politely, of course — that I can't take that 
bag of pears. I'd like to. They'd be a 
godsend to the mess. But I can't." 

Madame saw the impossibility in the end ; 
but she stuffed as many pears as she could 
into his pocket, and he went off bulging 
unbecomingly. 

M. used to complain that he ate too much 
when he came to stay with me. I confess 
that our midday meal — we ate it at noon, 
conforming to the custom of the house — was 
heavy. And Madame was old-fashioned in 
her idea of the behaviour proper to a hostess. 
She insisted on our eating whether we 
wanted to eat or not, and was vexed if we 
refused second and even third helpings. 



MADAME 187 

Madame was immensely interested in food 
and we talked about marketing and cookery 
every day. I came, towards the end of my 
stay, to have a fair knowledge of kitchen 
French. I could have attended cookery 
lectures with profit. I could even have 
taught a French servant how to stew a 
rabbit in such a way that it appeared at 
table brown, with thick brown sauce and a 
flavour of red wine. The marketing for the 
family was done by Madame and Marie, 
Marie in a high, stiff, white head-dress, carry- 
ing a large basket. 

On the subject of prices Madame was 
intensely curious. She wanted to know 
exactly what everything cost in England and 
Ireland. I used to write home for informa- 
tion, and then we did long and confusing 
sums, translating stones or pounds into 
kilos and shillings into francs ; Monsieur 
intervening occasionally with information 
about the rate of exchange at the moment. 
Madame insisted on taking this into account 
in comparing the cost of living in the two 
countries. Then we used to be faced with 
problems which I regard as insoluble. 

Perhaps a sum of this kind might be set 
in an arithmetic paper for advanced students. 
" Butter is 2s. Id. a pound. A kilo is rather 



188 MADAME 

more than two pounds. The rate of ex- 
change is 27 '85. What would that butter 
cost in France ? " 

We had an exciting time when the muni- 
cipal authorities of the town in which we 
lived introduced fixed prices. Madame, who 
is an entirely sensible woman, was frankly 
sceptical from the start about the pos- 
sibility of regulating prices. Gendarmes 
paraded the market-place, where on certain 
days the countrywomen sat in rows, their 
vegetables, fowl, eggs, and butter exposed 
for sale. They declined, of course, to accept 
the fixed prices. Madame and her friends, 
though they hated being overcharged, re- 
cognised the strength of the countrywomen's 
position. There was a combination between 
the buyers and sellers. 

The gendarmes were out-witted in various 
ways. One plan — Madame explained it to 
me with delight — was to drop a coin, as if by 
accident, into the lap of the countrywoman 
who was selling butter. Ten minutes later 
the purchaser returned and bought the 
butter under the eyes of a satisfied police- 
man at the fixed price. The original coin 
represented the difference between what the 
butter woman was willing to accept and 
what the authorities thought she ought to 



MADAME 189 

get. That experiment in municipal control 
of prices lasted about a month. Then the 
absurdity of the thing became too obvious. 
The French are much saner than the English 
in this. They do not go on pretending to 
do things once it becomes quite plain that 
the things cannot be done. 

Food shortage — much more serious now 
— was beginning to be felt while I lived with 
Madame. There were difficulties about sugar, 
and Monsieur had to, give up a favourite 
kind of white wine. But neither he nor 
Madame complained much ; though they 
belonged to the rentier class and were liable 
to suffer more than those whose incomes 
were capable of expansion. No one, so far 
as I know, appealed to them to practise 
economy in a spirit of lofty patriotism. 
They simply did with a little less of every- 
thing with a shrug of the shoulders and a 
smiling reference to the good times coming 
apres la guerre. And, on occasion, economy 
was forgotten and we feasted. 

One of the last days I spent in Madame's 
house was New Year's Day, 1917. I and my 
fellow- lodger, another padre, were solemnly 
invited to a dinner that night. It was a 
family affair. All Madame's nieces, married 
and single, were there, and their small 



190 MADAME 

children, two grand-nieces and a grand- 
nephew. Madame' s one nephew, wounded 
in the defence of Verdun, was there. 

Our usual table was greatly enlarged. 
The folding doors between the drawing- 
room and dining-room were Hung open. 
We had a blaze of lamps and candles. We 
began eating at 6. SO p.m. ; we stopped 
shortly after 10 p.m. But this was no 
brutal gorge. We ate slowly, with dis- 
crimination. We paused long between the 
courses. Once or twice we smoked. Once 
the grand-niece and grand-nephew recited 
for us, standing up, turn about, on their 
chairs, and declaiming with fluency and 
much gesture what were plainly school-learnt 
poems. One of Madame's nieces, passing 
into the drawing-room, played us a pleasant 
tune on the piano. At each break I thought 
that dinner was over. I was wrong time 
after time. We talked, smoked, listened, 
applauded, and then more food was set 
before us. 

There were customs new to me. At the 
appearance of the plum pudding — a very 
English pudding — we all rose from our 
scats and walked in solemn procession round 
the table. Each of us, as we passed the 
sacred dish, basted it with a spoonful of 



MADAME 191 

blazing rum, and, as we basted, made our 
silent wish. We formed pigs out of orange 
skins and gave them lighted matches for 
tails. By means of these we discovered 
which of us would be married or achieve 
other good fortune in the year to come. 
We drank five different kinds of wine, a 
sweet champagne coming by itself, a kind 
of dessert wine, at the very end of dinner, 
accompanied by small sponge cakes. 

The last thing of all was, oddly enough, 
tea. Like most French tea it was tasteless, 
but we remedied that with large quantities 
of sugar and we ate with it a very rich cake 
soaked in syrup, which would have deprived 
the fiercest Indian tea of any flavour. 

I think Madame was supremely happy 
all the evening. I think every one else was 
happy too. I have never met more courteous 
people. In the midst of the most hilarious 
talk and laughter a niece would stop laugh- 
ing suddenly and repeat very slowly for 
my benefit what the fun was about. Even 
when the soldier nephew told stories which 
in England would not have been told so 
publicly, a niece would take care that I 
did not miss the point. 

Madame's drawing-room was very wonder- 
ful. At one time she had known a painter, 



192 MADAME 

a professor of painting in a school near her 
home. He adorned the walls of her drawing- 
room with five large oil-paintings, done on 
the plaster of the wall and reaching from 
the ceiling to very near the floor. Four 
of them represented the seasons of the year, 
and that artist was plainly a man who might 
have made a good income drawing pictures 
for the lids of chocolate boxes. His fur- 
clad lady skating (Winter) would have de- 
lighted any confectioner. The fifth picture 
was a farmyard scene in which a small girl 
appeared, feeding ducks. This was the most 
precious of all the pictures. The little girl 
was Madame's niece, since married and the 
mother of a little girl of her own. 

The furniture was kept shrouded in holland 
and the jalousies were always shut except 
when Madame exhibited the room. I saw 
the furniture uncovered twice, and only 
twice. It was uncovered on the occasion 
of the New Year's feast, and Madame 
displayed her room in all its glory on the 
afternoon when I invited to tea a lady who 
was going to sing for the men in one of my 
camps. 

I think that all Madame's lodgers loved 
her, though I doubt if any of them loved 
her as dearly as I did. Letters used to 



MADAME i9S 

arrive for her from different parts of the 
war area conveying news of the officers 
who had lodged with her. She always 
brought them to me to translate. I fear 
she was not much wiser afterwards. She 
never answered any of them. Nor has she 
ever answered me, though I should greatly 
like to hear how she, Monsieur, Marie, Fifi, 
and Turque are getting on. Turque was a 
large dog, the only member of the household 
who was not extremely old. 



18 



CHAPTER XIII 

" THE CON. CAMP " 

We always spoke of it, affectionately and 
proudly, as " the Con. Camp." The abbrevia- 
tion was natural enough, for "convalescent" 
is a mouthful of a word to say, besides 
being very difficult to spell. I have known 
a beneficed clergyman of the Church of 
England come to grief over the consonants 
of the last two syllables in addressing an 
envelope to me ; and there was a story of 
a very august visitor, asked to write in an 
album, who inquired about a vowel and was 
given the wrong one by one of the staff. 
If those doubtful spellers had known our 
pleasant abbreviation they would have 
escaped disaster. 

To us the " Con." justified itself from 
every point of view. I am not sure that 
we had an equal right to the conceited use 
of the definite article. There are other 
" Con." camps in France, many of them. 
We spoke of them by their numbers. Ours 

194 



"THE CON. CAMP" 195 

had a number too, but we rarely used it. 
We were The Con. Camp. Our opinion 
was no doubt prejudiced ; but the authorities 
seemed to share it. The Con. Camp was 
one of the show places of the British Army. 
Distinguished visitors were always brought 
there. 

The Government, the War Office, or who- 
ever it is who settles such things, encourages 
distinguished visitors to inspect the war. 
There is a special officer set apart to conduct 
tourists from place to place and to show them 
the things they ought to see. He is provided 
with several motor-cars, a nice chateau, 
and a good cook. This is sensible. If you 
want a visitor to form a favourable opinion 
of anything, war, industry, or institution, 
you must make him fairly comfortable and 
feed him well. 

Yet I think that the life of that officer 
was a tiresome one. There was very little 
variety in his programme. He showed the 
same things over and over again, and he 
heard the same remarks made over and 
over again about the things he showed. 
Sometimes, of course, a distinguished visitor 
with a reputation for originality made a 
new remark. But that was worse. It is 
better to have to listen to an intelligent 



196 "THE CON. CAMP" 

comment a hundred times than to hear an 
unintelligent thing said once. Any new 
remark was sure to be stupid, because 
all the intelligent things had been said 
before. 

To us, who lived in the Con. Camp, dis- 
tinguished visitors, though common, were 
not very tiresome. We were not obliged 
to entertain them for very long at a time. 
They arrived at the camp about 3.30 p.m., 
and our CO. showed them round. After 
inspecting an incinerator, a tent, a bath, 
a Y.M.C.A. hut, and a kitchen, they came 
to the mess for tea. Our CO. was a man 
of immense courtesy and tact. He could 
answer the same question about an in- 
cinerator twice a week without showing the 
least sign of ever having heard it before. 

I have often wondered who selected the 
distinguished visitors, and on what principle 
the choice was made. Whoever he was he 
cast his net widely. 

Journalists of course abounded, American 
journalists chiefly — this was in 1916 — but 
we had representatives of Dutch, Norwegian, 
Swiss, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and South 
American papers. Once we even had a 
Roumanian, a most agreeable man, but I 
never felt quite sure whether he was a 



"THE CON. CAMP" 197 

journalist or a diplomatist. Perhaps he 
was both. 

Authors — writers of books rather than 
articles — were common and sometimes were 
quite interesting, though given to asking 
too many questions. It ought to be im- 
pressed on distinguished visitors that it is 
their business to listen to what they are 
told, and not to ask questions. 

Politicians often came. We once had a 
visit from Mr. Lloyd George, but I missed 
that to my grief. 

Generals and staff officers from neutral 
countries came occasionally in very attractive 
uniforms. 

Doctors always seemed to me more success- 
ful than other people in keeping up an 
appearance of intelligent interest. 

Ecclesiastics were dull. They evidently 
considered it bad form to allude to religion 
in any way and they did not know much 
about anything else. But ecclesiastics were 
rare. 

Royalties, I think, excited us most. We 
once had a visit from a king, temporarily 
exiled from his kingdom. He wore the most 
picturesque clothes I have ever seen off the 
stage and he was very gracious. All of our 
most strikingly wounded men — those who 



198 "THE CON. CAMP" 

wore visible bandages — were paraded for 
his inspection. He walked down the line, 
followed by a couple of aides-de-camp, some 
French officers of high rank, an English 
general, our CO., and then the rest of us. 
Our band played a tune which we hoped 
was his national anthem. He did not seem 
to recognise it, so it may not have been the 
right tune though we had done our best. 

He stopped opposite an undersized boy in 
a Lancashire regiment who had a bandage 
round his head and a nose blue with cold. 
The monarch made a remark in his own 
language. He must have known several 
other languages — all kings do — but he spoke 
his own. Perhaps kings have to, in order 
to show patriotism. An aide-de-camp trans- 
lated the remark into French. An inter- 
preter retranslated it into English. Some- 
body repeated it to the Lancashire boy. I 
dare say he was gratified, but I am sure he 
did not in the least agree with the king. 
What his Majesty said was, " How splendid 
a thing to be wounded in this glorious 
war ! " 

It is easy to point a cheap moral to the 
tale. So kings find pleasure in their peculiar 
sport. So boys who would much rather be 
watching football matches at home suffer 



"THE CON. CAMP" 199 

and are sad. Delirant reges. Plectuntur 
Achivi. 

It is all as old as the hills, and republicans 
may make the most of it. Yet I think that 
that king meant what he said, and would 
have felt the same if the bandage had been 
round his own head and he had been wearing 
the uniform of a private soldier. There are 
a few men in the world who really enjoy 
fighting, and that king — unless his face utterly 
belies him — is one of them. Nothing, I 
imagine, except his great age, kept him out 
of the battles which his subjects fought. 

The Con. Camp deserved the reputation 
which brought us those nights of distin- 
guished visitors. I may set this down 
proudly without being suspected of conceit, 
for I had nothing to do with making the 
camp what it was. Success in a camp or a 
battalion depends first on three men — the 
CO., the adjutant, and the sergeant-major. 
We were singularly fortunate in all three. 

The next necessity is what the Americans 
call " team work." The whole staff must 
pull together, each member of it knowing 
and trusting the others. It was so in that 
camp. The result was fine, smooth-running 
organisation. No emergency disturbed the 
working of the camp. No sudden call found 



200 "THE CON. CAMP" 

the staff unprepared or helpless. So much, 
I think, any one visiting and inspecting the 
camp might have seen and appreciated. 
What a visitor, however intelligent, or an 
inspector, though very able, would not have 
discovered was the spirit which inspired 
the discipline of the camp. 

Ours was a medical camp. We flew the 
Red Cross flag and our CO. was an officer in 
the R.A.M.C. Doctors, though they belong 
to a profession which exists for the purpose 
of alleviating human suffering, are not always 
and at all times humane men. Like other 
men they sometimes fall into the mistake 
of regarding discipline not as a means but 
as an end in itself. In civil life the par- 
ticular kind of discipline which seduces them 
is called professional etiquette. In the army 
they become, occasionally, the most bigoted 
worshippers of red-tape. When that hap- 
pens a doctor becomes a fanatic more 
ruthless than an inquisitor of old days. 

In the Con. Camp the discipline was good, 
as good as possible ; but our CO. was a 
wise man. He never forgot that the camp 
existed for the purpose of restoring men's 
bodies to health and not as an example of 
the way to make rules work. The spirit 
of the camp was most excellent. Regulation* 



"THE CON. CAMP" 201 

were never pressed beyond the point at 
which they were practically of use. Sym- 
pathy, the sympathy which man naturally 
feels for a suffering fellow-man, was not 
strangled by parasitic growths of red-tape. 
We had to thank the CO. and after him 
the adjutant for this. I met no officers 
more humane than these two, or more 
patient with all kinds of weakness and 
folly in the men with whom they had to deal. 

They were well supported by their 
staff and by the voluntary workers in the 
two recreation huts run by the Y.M.C.A. 
and the Catholic Women's League. The 
work of the C.W.L. ladies differed a little 
from that of any recreation hut I had seen 
before. They made little attempt to cater 
for the amusement of the men. They dis- 
couraged personal friendships between the 
workers and the men. They aimed at a cer- 
tain refinement in the equipment and decora- 
tion of their hut. They provided food of a 
superior kind, very nicely served. I think 
their efforts were appreciated by many 
men. 

On the other hand the workers in the 
Y.M.C.A. hut there as everywhere made 
constant efforts to provide entertainments 
of some kind. Three or four days at least 



202 "THE CON. CAMP" 

out of every week there was " something 
on." Sometimes it was a concert, sometimes 
a billiard tournament, or a ping-pong tourna- 
ment, or a competition in draughts or chess. 
Occasionally, under the management of a 
lady who specialised in such things, we had 
a hat-trimming competition, an enormously 
popular kind of entertainment both for 
spectators and performers. Every sugges- 
tion of a new kind of entertainment was wel- 
comed and great pains were taken to carry 
it through. 

I only remember one occasion on which the 
leader of that hut shrank from the form of 
amusement proposed to him. The idea 
came from a Canadian soldier who said he 
wished we would get up a pie-eating com- 
petition. This sounded exciting, and we 
asked for details. The competitors, so the 
Canadian said, have their hands tied behind 
their backs, go down on their knees and eat 
open jam tarts which are laid flat on the 
ground. He said the game was popular 
in the part of Canada he came from. I 
longed to see it tried ; but the leader of the 
hut refused to venture on it. It would, he 
said, be likely to be very messy. He was 
probably right. 

In thatjiut the workers aimed constantly 



"THE CON. CAMP" 203 

at getting into personal touch with the men. 
This was far easier in the Con. Camp than at 
the base camp where " Woodbine " was. The 
numbers of men were smaller. As a rule 
they stayed longer with us. But at best 
it is only possible for a canteen worker to 
make friends with a few men. With most 
of those who enter the hut she can have 
no personal relations. But I am sure that 
the work done is of immense value, and it is 
probably those who need sympathy and 
friendship most who come seeking it, a little 
shyly, from the ladies who serve them. 

In normal times the Con. Camp received 
men from the hospitals ; men who were not 
yet fit to return to their regiments, but who 
had ceased to need the constant ministra- 
tions of doctors and nurses. The conditions 
of life were more comfortable than in base 
camps, much more comfortable than at 
the front or in billets. The men slept in 
large tents, warmed and well lighted. They 
had beds. The food was good and abundant. 
Great care and attention was given to the 
cooking. 

Much trouble was taken about amuse- 
ments. The camp had a ground for football 
and cricket. It possessed a small stage, set 
up in one of the dining-halls, where plays 



204 "THE CON. CAMP" 

were acted, a Christmas pantomime per- 
formed, and a variety entertainment given 
every week. There were whist drives with 
attractive prizes for the winners. Duty 
was light. Besides the " fatigues " neces- 
sary for keeping the camp in order there 
were route marches for those who could 
march, and an elaborate system of physical 
exercises under trained instructors. 

The men remained in camp for varying 
periods. No man was kept there for more 
than three months. But some men passed 
through the camp being marked fit almost 
as soon as they left hospital. That was the 
normal routine ; but it happened once while 
I was there that things became very ab- 
normal and the organisation of the camp 
was tested with the utmost severity. 

Just before the Somme offensive began 
some mischievous devil put it into the heads 
of the authorities to close down the only 
other convalescent camp in the neighbour- 
hood. Its inmates were sent to us and we 
had to make room for them. Our cricket 
ground was sacrificed. Paths were run 
across the pitch. Tents were erected all 
over it. My church tent became the home 
of a harmonium, the only piece of ecclesi- 
astical salvage from the camp that was closed. 



"THE CON. CAMP" 205 

Then my church tent was taken from me, 
sacrificed like all luxuries to the accommoda- 
tion of men. Just as we were beginning to 
settle down again came the Somme offensive. 

Like every one else in France we had long 
expected the great push. Yet when it came 
it came with startling suddenness. We went 
out one morning to find the streets of the 
town crowded with ambulances. They 
followed each other in a long, slow, appar- 
ently unending procession across the bridge 
which led into the town from the railway 
station. They split off into small parties 
turning to the left and skirting the sea shore 
along the broad, glaring parade, or climbed 
with many hootings through the narrow 
streets of the old town. Staring after them 
as they passed us we saw inside figures 
of men very still, very silent, bandaged, 
swathed. 

All the morning, hour after hour, the long 
procession went on. The ambulances, 
cleared of their burdens at the various 
hospitals, turned at once and drove furiously 
back to the station. The hospitals were 
filled and overfilled and overflowing. Men 
who could stand more travelling were hurried 
to the hospital ships. Stretcher-bearers 
toiled and sweated. The steamers, laden 



206 "THE CON. CAMP" 

to their utmost capacity, slipped from the 
quay side and crept out into the Channel. 
One hospital was filled and cleared three 
times in twenty-four hours. The strain on 
doctors and nurses must have been terrific. 

For one day we in the Con. Camp remained 
untouched by the rushing torrent. Then 
our turn came. The number of lightly 
wounded men was very great. Many of 
them could walk and take care of them- 
selves. A hospital bed and hospital treat- 
ment were not absolutely necessary for them. 
They were sent to us. They arrived in 
char-a-bancs, thirty at a time. We possessed 
a tiny hospital, meant for the accommodation 
of cases of sudden illness in the camp. It 
was turned into a dressing-station. 

The wounded men sat or lay on the grass 
outside waiting for their turns to go in. 
They wore the tattered, mud-caked clothes 
of the battlefield. The bandages of the 
casualty clearing-station were round their 
limbs and heads. Some were utterly ex- 
hausted. They lay down. They pillowed 
their heads on their arms and sank into 
heavy slumber. Some, half hysterical with 
excitement, sat bolt upright and talked, 
talked incessantly, whether any one listened 
to them or not. They laughed too, but it 



"THE CON. CAMP" 207 

was a horrible kind of laughter. Some 
seemed stupefied; they neither slept nor 
talked. They sat where they were put, 
and stared in front of them with eyes which 
never seemed to blink. 

Most of the men were calm, quiet, and very 
patient. I think their patience was the 
most wonderful thing I ever saw. They 
suffered, had suffered, and much suffering 
was before them. Yet no word of complaint 
came from them. They neither cursed God 
nor the enemy nor their fate. I have seen 
dumb animals, dogs and cattle, with this 
same look of trustful patience in their faces. 
But these were men who could think, reason, 
feel, and express themselves as animals can- 
not. Their patience and their quiet trust- 
fulness moved me so that it was hard not to 
weep. 

By twos and threes the men were called 
from the group outside and passed through 
the door of the dressing-station. The doctors 
waited for them in the surgery. The label 
on each man was read, his wound examined. 
A note was swiftly written ordering certain 
dressings and treatment. The man passed 
into what had been the ward of the hospital. 
Here the R.A.M.C. orderlies worked and 
with them two nurses spared for our need 



208 "THE CON. CAMP" 

from a neighbouring hospital. Wounds were 
stripped, dressed, rebandaged. Sometimes 
fragments of shrapnel were picked out. 

The work went on almost silently hour 
after hour from early in the morning till 
long after noon. Yet there was no hurry, 
no fuss, and I do not think there was a 
moment's failure in gentleness. Some hard 
things have been said about R.A.M.C. order- 
lies and about nurses too. Perhaps they 
have been deserved occasionally. I saw 
their work at close quarters and for many 
days in that one place, nowhere else and 
not again there ; but what I saw was good. 

With wounds dressed and bandaged, the 
men went out again. They were led across 
the camp to the quartermaster's stores and 
given clean underclothes in place of shirts 
and drawers sweat soaked, muddy, caked 
hard with blood. With these in their arms 
they went to the bath-house, to hot water, 
soap, and physical cleanness. Then they 
were fed, and for the moment all we could 
do for them was done. 

These were all lightly wounded men, but, 
even remembering that, their power of 
recuperation seemed astonishing. Some 
went after dinner to their tents, lay down 
on their beds and slept. Even of them few 



"THE CON. CAMP" 209 

stayed asleep for very long. They got up, 
talked to each other, joined groups which 
formed outside the tents, wandered through 
the camp, eagerly curious about their new 
surroundings. They found their way into 
the recreation huts and canteens. They 
shouted and cheered the performers at 
concerts or grouped themselves round the 
piano and sang their own songs. Those who 
had money bought food at the counter. 

But many had no money and no prospect 
of getting any. They might have gone, 
not hungry, but what is almost worse, 
yearning for dainties and tobacco, if it were 
not for the generosity of their comrades. 
I have seen men with twopence and no 
more, men who were longing for a dozen 
things themselves, share what the twopence 
bought with comrades who had not even 
a penny. I passed two young soldiers near 
the door of a canteen. One of them stopped 
me and very shyly asked me if I would give 
him a penny for an English stamp. He 
fished it out from the pocket of his pay -book. 
It was dirty, crumpled, most of the gum 
gone, but unused and not defaced. I gave 
him the penny. " Come on, Sam," he said, 
" we'll get a packet of fags." 

They say a lawyer sees the worst side of 
14 



210 "THE CON. CAMP" 

human nature. A parson probably sees the 
best of it ; but though I have been a parson 
for many years and seen many good men 
and fine deeds, I have seen nothing more 
splendid, I cannot imagine anything more 
splendid, than the comradeship, the brotherly 
love of our soldiers. 

The very first day of the rush of the lightly 
wounded into our camp brought us men of 
the Ulster Division. I heard from the 
mouths of the boys I talked to the Ulster 
speech, dear to me from all the associations 
and memories of my childhood. I do not 
suppose that those men fought better than 
any other men, or bore pain more patiently, 
but there was in them a kind of fierce resent- 
ment. They had not achieved the conquest 
they hoped. They had been driven back, 
had been desperately cut up. They had 
emerged from their great battle a mere 
skeleton of their division. 

But I never saw men who looked less like 
beaten men. Those Belfast citizens, who 
sign Covenants and form volunteer armies 
at home, have in them the fixed belief that 
no one in the world is equal to them or can 
subdue them. It seems an absurd and 
arrogant faith. But there is this to be said. 
They remained just as convinced of their 



"THE CON. CAMP" 211 

own strength after their appalling experience 
north of the Somme as they were when 
they shouted for Sir Edward Carson in the 
streets of Belfast. Men who believe in their 
invincibility the day after they have been 
driven back, with their wounds fresh and 
their bones aching with weariness, are men 
whom it will be very difficult to conquer. 

Nothing was more interesting than to 
note the different moods of these wounded 
men. One morning, crossing the camp at 
about 7 o'clock, I met a Canadian, a 
tall, gaunt man. I saw at once that he had 
just arrived from the front. The left sleeve 
of his tunic was cut away. The bandage 
round his forearm was soiled and stained. 
His face was unshaven and very dirty. 
His trousers were extraordinarily tattered 
and caked with yellow mud. He had some- 
how managed to lose one boot and walked 
unevenly in consequence. I had heard the 
night before something about the great 
and victorious fight in which this man 
had been. I congratulated him. He looked 
at me with a slow, humorous smile. 
" Well," he drawled, " they certainly did 
run some." 

A Lancashire boy, under-sized, anaemic- 
looking, his clothes hanging round him in 



212 "THE CON. CAMP" 

strips, got hold of me one morning outside 
the dressing-station and told me in a high* 
pitched voice a most amazing story. It was 
the best battle story I ever heard from the 
lips of a soldier, and the boy who told it to 
me was hysterical. He had been buried 
twice, he and his officer and his Lewis gun, 
in the course of an advance. He had met 
the Prussian Guard in the open, he and his 
comrades, and the famous crack corps had 
" certainly run some." That was not the 
boy's phrase. When he reached the climax 
of his tale his language was a rich mixture 
of blasphemy and obscenity. 

There was a Munster Fusilier, an elderly, 
grizzled man who had been sent back with 
some German prisoners. He had, by his 
own account, quite a flock of them when 
he started. He found himself, owing to 
shrapnel and other troubles, with only one 
left when he drew near his destination. 

But he was a provident man. He had 
collected all available loot from the men 
who had fallen on the way down, and the 
unfortunate survivor was so laden that he 
collapsed, sank into the mud under an 
immense load of helmets, caps, belts, every- 
thing that could have been taken from the 
dead. The Munster Fusilier stood over him 



"THE CON. CAMP" 213 

with his rifle. " You misfortunate b ," 

he said. " And them words," he said to 
me confidentially, " got a move on him, 
though it was myself had to carry the load 
for him the rest of the way." 



CHAPTER XIV 

A BACKWATER 

I look back with great pleasure on my 
connection with the Emergency Stretcher- 
bearers' Camp. It was one of three camps 
in which I worked when I went to B. I 
liked all three camps and every one in them, 
but I cherish a feeling of particular tender- 
ness for the Stretcher-bearers. 

Yet my first experience there was far from 
encouraging. The day after I took over from 
my predecessor I ventured into the men's 
recreation room. I was received with silence, 
frosty and most discouraging. I made a 
few remarks about the weather. I com- 
mented on the stagnant condition of the 
war at the moment. The things I said were 
banal and foolish no doubt, yet I meant 
well and scarcely deserved the reply which 
came at last. A man who was playing 
billiards dropped the butt of his cue on the 
ground with a bang, surveyed me with a 
hostile stare and said : 

214 



A BACKWATER 215 

" We don't want no parsons here." 

Somebody in a far corner of the room 
protested mildly. 

" Language, language," he said. 

I did not really object much to the lan- 
guage. I had heard the British soldiers' 
favourite word too often to be shocked by 
it. What did hurt and embarrass me was 
the fact that I was not welcome ; and no 
one made any attempt to reassure me on 
that point. 

Indeed when the same unpleasant fact 
that I really was not welcome was conveyed 
to me without obscenity in the next camp 
and with careful politeness in the third I 
found it even more disagreeable than it was 

when the stretcher-bearer called me a 

parson. The officers in the convalescent 
camp, the centre camp in my charge, were 
all kindness in their welcome ; but the 

sergeant-major . We became fast friends 

afterwards, but the day we first met he 
looked me over and decided that I was an 
inefficient simpleton. Without speaking a 
word he made his opinion plain to me. He 
was appallingly efficient himself and I do 
not think he ever altered his perfectly just 
opinion of me. But in the end, and long 
before the end, he did all he could to help me. 



216 A BACKWATER 

The worst of all the snubs waited me in 
Marlborough Camp, and came from a lady 
worker, afterwards the dearest and most 
valued of the many friends I made in France. 
I shall not soon forget the day I first entered 
her canteen. She and her fellow-worker, 
also a valued friend now, did not call me a 

" P arson " ; b ut they left me under 

the impression that I was not wanted there. 
Her snub, delivered as a lady delivers such 
things, was the worst of the three. 

For my reception in the Stretcher-bearers' 
Camp I was prepared. 

4 You'll find those fellows a pretty tough 
crowd," so some one warned me. 

4 Those old boys are bad lots," said some 
one else. "You'll not do any good with 
them." 

I agree with the " tough." I totally dis- 
agree with the " bad." Even if, after eight 
months, I had been bidden farewell in the 
same phrase with which I was greeted I 
should still refuse to say " bad lot " about 
those men. I hope that in such a case I 
should have the grace to recognise the 
failure as my fault, not theirs, and to take 
the " bad lot " as a description of myself. 

The Emergency Stretcher-bearers when 
I first knew them were no man's children. 



A BACKWATER 217 

The Red Cross flag flew over the entrance 
of their camp, but the Red Cross people 
accepted no responsibility for them. Their 
recreation room, which was not a room at 
all, but one end of their gaunt dining-room, 
was ill supplied with books and games, and 
had no papers. There were no lady workers 
in or near the camp, and only those who have 
seen the work which our ladies do in canteens 
in France can realise how great the loss was. 
There was no kind of unity in the camp. 

It was a small place. There were not more 
than three hundred men altogether. But 
they were men from all sorts of regiments, 
I think that when I knew the camp first, 
nearly every one in it belonged to the old 
army. They were gathered there, the sal- 
vage of the Mons retreat, of the Marne, of the 
glorious first battle of Ypres, broken men 
every one of them, debris tossed by the 
swirling currents of war into this backwater. 

Their work was heavy, thankless, and 
uninspiring. They were camped on a hill. 
Day after day they marched down through 
the streets of the town to the railway station 
or the quay. They carried the wounded on 
stretchers from the hospital trains to the 
Red Cross ambulances ; or afterwards from 
the ambulance cars up steep gangways to 



218 A BACKWATER 

the decks and cabins of hospital ships. 
They were summoned by telephone at all 
hours. They toiled in the grey light of 
early dawn. They sweated at noonday. 
Soaked and dripping they bent their backs 
to their burdens in storm and rain. They 
went long hours without food. They lived 
under conditions of great discomfort. It 
was everybody's business to curse and 
" strafe " them. I do not remember that 
any one ever gave them a word of praise. 

It was the camp, of all that I was ever in, 
which seemed to offer the richest yield to the 
gleaner of war stories. I have always wanted 
to know what that retreat from Mons felt 
like to the men who went through it. We 
are assured, and I do not doubt it, that our 
men never thought of themselves as beaten. 
What did they think when day after day 
they retreated at top speed ? Of what they 
suffered we know something. How they 
took their suffering we only guess. I hoped 
when I made friends with those men to hear 
all this and many strange tales of personal 
adventures. 

But the British soldier, even of the new 
army, is strangely inarticulate. The men 
of the old army, so far as concerns their 
fighting, are almost dumb. They would talk 



A BACKWATER 219 

about anything rather than their battles. 
There was a man in the Life Guards who 
had received three wounds in one of the 
early cavalry skirmishes. He wanted te 
talk about cricket, and told me stories 
about a church choir in which he sang when 
he was a boy. 

There was a Coldstream Guardsman. I 
never succeeded in rinding out whether he 
was in the famous Landrecies fight or not. 
The most he would do in the way of military 
talk was to complain, privately, to me of 
the lax discipline in the camp, and to com- 
pare the going of his comrades from the 
camp to the quay with the marching of the 
Coldstr earners on their way to relieve guard 
at Buckingham Palace. There was an old 
sergeant from County Down who was more 
interested in growing vegetables — we had a 
garden — than anything else, and a Munster 
Fusilier who came from Derry, of all places, 
and exulted in the fact that his sons had 
taken his place in the regiment. 

At first this curious reticence was a dis- 
appointment to me. It is still a wonder. 
I am sure that if I had been one of the "Old 
Contemptibles " I should talk of nothing 
else all my life. But I came to see afterwards 
that if I had heard battle stories I should 



220 A BACKWATER 

never have known the men. The centre of 
interest of their lives was at home. They, 
even those professional soldiers, were men 
of peace rather than war. The soldiers' 
trade was no delight to them. 

I dare say the Germans, who took pains 
to learn so much about us beforehand, knew 
this, and drew, as Germans so often do, 
a wrong inference from facts patiently 
gathered. They thought that men who do 
not like fighting fight badly. It may be so 
sometimes. It was certainly not so with 
our old army. We know now that it 
is not so with the men of our new army 
either. 

After a while the stretcher-bearers and I 
began to know each other. The first sign 
of friendliness was a request that I should 
umpire at a cricket match on a Sunday 
afternoon. I am not sure that the invita- 
tion was not also a test. Some parsons, 

the " " kind, who are not wanted, 

object to cricket on Sundays. My own 
conscience is more accommodating. I would 
gladly have umpired at Monte Carlo on Good 
Friday, Easter, Advent Sunday, and Christ- 
mas, all rolled into one, if those men had 
asked me. 

Later on, after many cricket matches, we 



A BACKWATER 221 

agreed that it was desirable to get up enter- 
tainments in the camp. There was no local 
talent, or none available at first, but I had 
the good luck to meet one day a very amiable 
lady who undertook to run a whole enter- 
tainment herself. She also promised not to 
turn round and walk away when she saw 
the piano. 

We stirred ourselves, determined to rise to 
the occasion. We made a platform at the 
end of the dining-room. I took care not 
to ask, and I do not know, where the wood 
for that platform came from. We dis- 
covered among us a man who said he had 
been a theatrical scene painter before he 
joined the R.E. He can never, I fancy, 
have had much chance of rising to the top 
of his old profession, but he painted a back 
scene for our stage. It represented a country 
cottage standing in a field, and approached 
by an immensely long, winding, brown path. 
The perspective of that path was wonderful. 
He also painted and set up two wings on the 
stage which were easily recognisable as leafy 
trees. For many Sundays afterwards I 
stood in front of that cottage with a green 
tree on each side of me during morning 
service. 

Another artist volunteered to do our 



222 A BACKWATER 

programmes. His work lay in the orderly- 
room and he had at command various 
coloured inks, black, violet, blue, and red. 
He produced a programme like a rainbow 
on which he described our lady visitor as 
the " Famous Favourite of the Music Hall 
Stage." She had, in fact, delighted theatre 
goers before her marriage, but not on the 
music hall stage. I showed her the pro- 
gramme nervously, but I need not have been 
nervous. She entered into the spirit of the 
thing. 

A thoughtful sergeant, without consulting 
me, prepared for her a dressing-room at the 
back of the stage. A modest man himself, 
he insisted upon my leading her to it. We 
found there a shelf, covered with news- 
paper. On it was a shaving mirror, a 
large galvanised-iron tub half full of cold 
water, a cake of brown soap, a tattered 
towel, and a comb. Also there was a 
tumbler, a siphon of soda water, and a 
bottle of port. 

"The dears," she said. "But I can't 
change my frock; I've nothing but what 
I stand up in. What shall I do ? " 

I glanced at the bottle of port ; but she 
shrank from that. 

" I must do something," she said. " I'll 



A BACKWATER 228 

powder my nose." The shaving mirror, at 
least, was some use. 

The entertainment began stiffly. We were 
not accustomed to entertainments and felt 
that we ought to behave with propriety. 
We clapped at the end of each song, but we 
displayed no enthusiasm. I began to fear 
for our success. But our lady — she did the 
whole thing herself^-conquered us. We 
were laughing and cheering in half an hour. 
In the end we rocked in our seats and howled 
tumultuously when the sergeant-major, a 
portly man of great dignity, was dragged 
over the footlights. Our lady pirouetted 
across the stage and back again, her arm 
round the sergeant-major's waist, her cheek 
on his shoulder, singing, " If I were the 
only girl in the world and you were the 
only boy." 

We believed in doing what we could for 
those who came to entertain us. When we 
secured the services of a " Le a Ashwell " 
Concert Party we painted a large sign and 
hung it up in front of the stage : " Welcome 
to the Concert Party." We forgot the 
second " e " in Welcome and it had to be 
crammed in at the last moment above the 
" m " with a " a " underneath it. 

We made two dressing-rooms, one for 



224 A BACKWATER 

ladies and one for gentlemen. The fittings 
were the same — brown soap, cold water, 
shaving mirror, tumbler and siphon. But 
in the gentlemen's room we put whisky, in 
the ladies' port. The whole party had tea 
afterwards in the sergeants' mess — strong 
tea and tinned tongue. A corporal stood 
at the door as we left holding a tray covered 
with cigarettes. 

I learned to play cribbage while I was in 
that camp. I was pitted, by common 
consent, against an expert, a man who had 
been wounded at Le Cateau and had his 
teeth knocked out as he lay on the ground 
by a passing German, who used the butt 
of his rifle. Round me were a dozen 
men, who gave me advice and explained in 
whispers the finesse of the game. It was 
hot work, for the men sat close and we all 
smoked. 

I also learned that the British soldier, 
when he gives his mind to it, plays a masterly 
game of draughts. There was a man — in 
civil life he sailed a Thames barge — who 
insulted me deeply over draughts. He used 
to allow me to win one game in three, and he 
managed so well that it was weeks before 
I found out what he was doing. 

We had whist drives, and once a billiard 



A BACKWATER 225 

tournament, run on what I believe is a novel 
principle. We had only one table, half 
sized and very dilapidated. We had about 
thirty entries. We gave each player five 
minutes and let him score as much as he 
could in the time, no opponent interfering 
with him. The highest score took the 
prize. 

But all entertainments and games in that 
camp were liable to untimely interruption. 
Messages used to come through from some 
remote authority demanding stretcher- 
bearers. Then, though it were in the midst 
of a game of whist, every man present had 
to get up and go away. 

There was one occasion on which such a 
summons arrived just as the men had 
assembled to welcome a concert party. 
The dining-room was empty in five minutes. 
We who remained were faced with the 
prospect of a concert without an audience. 
But our sergeant-major met the emergency. 
He hurried to a neighbouring camp and 
somehow managed to borrow two hundred 
men. The concert party was greatly pleased, 
but said that the Emergency Stretcher- 
bearers did not look as old and dilapidated 
as they had been led to expect. 

There came a time when the camp changed 
15 



226 A BACKWATER 

and many old friends disappeared. At the 
beginning of the Somme battle there was a 
sudden demand for stretcher-bearers to 
serve at the advanced dressing-stations. 
Almost every day we were bidden to send 
men. Little parties assembled on the parade 
ground and inarched off to entrain for the 
front. I used to see them lined up on the 
parade ground, war-battered men, who 
looked old though they were young, with 
their kits spread out for inspection. The 
least unfit went first ; but indeed there was 
little choice among them. Not a man of 
them but had been wounded grievously or 
mourned a constitution broken by hardship. 
Yet they went cheerfully, patient in their 
dumb devotion to duty, hopeful that the 
final victory for which they had striven in 
vain was near at hand at last. 

" We'll have peace before Christmas." 
So they said to me as they went. 

That " Peace before Christmas " ! It has 
fluttered, a delusive vision, before our men 
since the start. " Is it true that the cavalry 
are through ? " I suppose that was another 
delusion, that riding down of a flying foe by 
horsemen. But it was not only the stretcher- 
bearers who clung to it. 

We saw our friends no more after they 



A BACKWATER 227 

disappeared into the smoking furnace of 
the front. They were scattered here and 
there among the dressing-stations in the 
fighting area. Many of them, I suppose, 
stayed there, struck down at last, ending 
their days in France as they began them, 
with the sound of the guns in their ears. 
Others, perhaps, drifted back to England 
more hopelessly broken than ever. They 
must be walking our streets now with silver 
badges on the lapels of their coats, and we, 
who are much meaner men, should take our 
hats off to them. A few may be toiling 
still, where the fighting is thickest, the last 
remnants of the " Old Contemptibles." 

Their places in the camp and their work 
on the quays were taken by others, men 
disabled or broken in the later fights when 
the new armies won their glory. The char- 
acter of the camp changed. We became 
more respectable than we were in the old 
days. No one any longer spoke of us as a 
14 bad lot," or called us " a tough crowd." 
Perhaps we were not so tough. Certainly 
we cannot have been tougher than the men 
who made good in those first terrific days, 
who continued to make good long after they 
could fight no more, staggering through the 
Somme mud with laden stretchers. They 



228 A BACKWATER 

grumbled and groused. They blasphemed 
constantly. They drank when they could. 

They wanted no " parson " among 

them. But they were men, unconquered 
and unconquerable. 



CHAPTER XV 

MY THIRD CAMP 

At the front, the actual front where the 
fighting is, imagination runs riot in devising 
place names, and military maps recognise 
woods, hills, and roads by their new titles. 
At the bases a severer spirit holds sway. 
I recollect one curious and disagreeable 
camp which was called, colloquially and 
officially, Cinder City. Otherwise camps 
were known by numbers or at best by the 
French names of the districts in which they 
were situated. I thought I had hit on 
another exception to this rule when I first 
heard of this camp. It seemed natural 
to have called a camp after one of our 
generals. In fact nothing of the sort oc- 
curred. It was the French name for the 
place. We took over the name when we 
pitched our tents. 

Indeed the camp was not the sort of 
place which gets a name given to it. It 

229 



230 MY THIRD CAMP 

is only places which somebody loves or 
hates, in which somebody is one way or 
other interested, which get new names 
given them. Nobody, or nobody in high 
authority, took an interest in this camp. 
It was a stepchild among camps, neither 
attractive enough to be loved nor dis- 
agreeable enough to be hated and reviled. 

With a string of other dull camps, it 
was under the command of a colonel 
who, having much on Iris mind besides 
the care of this camp, lived elsewhere. 
Only one officer slept in the camp. He 
had a bedroom which was half office, 
decorated — he several times assured me that 
his predecessor was responsible for the 
decoration — with pictures from La Vie 
Parisienne. The proprietors of that journal 
must have profited enormously by the coming 
of the British military force. If there is 
any form of taxation of excess profits in 
France that editor must be paying heavily. 
Yet the paper is sufficiently monotonous, 
and it is difficult to imagine that any one 
wants to take it in regularly. 

Except this bedroom, the officer in com- 
mand had no habitation in the camp. 
He messed elsewhere and, as was natural, 
spent his spare time elsewhere. He 



MY THIRD CAMP 231 

did all he could for the camp, but he 
could not do very much. He was of sub- 
ordinate rank and of no great military 
importance. It was very difficult to stir 
the authorities to any great interest in 
the camp. There was a certain amount 
of excuse for them. It never seemed worth 
while to take much trouble for the men 
there. The function of the camp was 
peculiar. Men were drafted into it from 
convalescent camps and hospitals when they 
were passed " fit," and were ready to rejoin 
their units. The business of the camp 
authorities was to sort the men out, divide 
them into parties, and dispatch them to the 
depots of their regiments. 

Every day men came into camp and were 

for the moment " details." They belonged 

to all possible regiments and branches of the 

service. Every day parties of men left the 

camp for the different base depots. At 

10 a.m. the H. party for H., at 12 noon 

the E. party for E., no longer " details," 

but drafts consigned to their proper depots 

at H., E., or elsewhere. Their stay in 

the camp was usually very brief. It was 

scarcely worth while trying to make them 

comfortable or doing anything to make life 

pleasant for them. 



232 MY THIRD CAMP 

It was, I think, rather hard on men to 
be sent straight from the comfort and warmth 
of a hospital or convalescent camp to a 
place as Spartan as this. Instead of having 
a bed to sleep on, the unfortunate " detail " 
found himself condemned to the floor boards 
of a bell tent, with a very meagre allow- 
ance of well-worn blankets. In cold weather 
the change was abrupt and trying, but of 
course it had to be made sooner or later, 
and I suppose the men had no reasonable 
excuse for grumbling. 

Very much harder on them was the lack 
of accommodation in the camp. Things 
are much better now in this respect; but 
when I knew the camp first, there was no 
recreation room except a small and incon- 
venient E.F. Canteen. 

The Y.M.C.A. never established itself 
there. The Church Army put up a small 
hut, but sent no worker to look after it; 
and even that hut was not opened till the 
early summer of 1916. By a curious chance 
the E.F. Canteen was worked by ladies instead 
of the usual orderlies. The ladies were in 
fact there, running a small independent 
canteen, before the E.F. Canteen took over 
the place. Rather unwillingly, I think, 
the E.F. Canteen people took over these 



MY THIRD CAMP 233 

ladies. It was a most fortunate thing that 
they did so. 

Miss L., the head of this little band of 
workers, was a lady of unusual ability, energy, 
and sympathy. I have said that no one 
in authority cared for the camp. Miss L., 
who had no military authority, not only 
cared for it — she loved it. It was to her 
and her assistants that the camp owed most 
of what was done for it. I have seen much 
splendid work done by our voluntary ladies 
in France, but I have never seen better work 
done under more difficult circumstances 
than was done by these ladies. 

I suppose it is foolish to be surprised at 
any evidence of the blatant vulgarity of the 
men who earn their living by the horrid 
trade of politics. They speak and act after 
their kind ; and it is probably true that 
silk purses cannot be made out of sows' ears. 
Yet I own to having experienced a shock 
when Mr. Macpherson in the House of 
Commons described our lady workers as 
" camp followers." Even for a politician, 
even in the House of Commons, that was 
bad. 

Miss L. and her assistants had no great 
organisation behind them to which they 
could appeal, which would take their part 



234 MY THIRD CAMP 

and fight their battles. Like the men they 
worked for, they were " details." The E.F. 
Canteen authorities, who employed but did 
not pay them, looked upon those ladies with 
suspicion. They were allowed to work. 
They were not welcomed. I think the 
E.F. Canteen people would have got rid 
of them if they could. Yet they did work 
which in quantity was at least equal to 
that of the orderlies usually employed, and 
in quality enormously superior. 

The room which served as a canteen was 
singularly inconvenient. The part of it used 
by the men was far too small, and used to be 
disagreeably crowded in the evenings and on 
wet days. The space behind the counter 
was narrow, gloomy, and ill ventilated, A 
worker serving there had the choice of being 
half choked or blown about by furious 
draughts. Miss L. preferred the draughts, 
which she called " fresh air." I sometimes 
found myself inclined to regard suffocation 
as the pleasanter alternative. 

I have never seen a more inconvenient 
kitchen than that in which those ladies 
worked. It was small, low, and very gloomy. 
It had an uneven floor, on which it was 
quite possible to trip. The roof leaked 
badly in half a dozen places, and on wet 



MY THIRD CAMP 235 

days an incautious person splashed about. 
In summer with two fires burning that 
kitchen became fiercely hot. Even an 
electric fan, presented by a sympathetic 
visitor, did little to help. No self-respecting 
English kitchen maid would have stayed two 
hours in a house where she was given such 
a kitchen to work in. 

Yet wonderful hot suppers were cooked 
there in long succession. Huge puddings 
and deep crocks of stewed fruit were pre- 
pared. A constant supply of tea, coffee, 
and cocoa was kept ready to replenish 
exhausted kettles on the counter outside, 
and all the washing up for hundreds of men 
was done in a very small sink. 

The cooking and bar serving were the 
smallest part of the work those ladies did. 
Miss L. was active as a gardener. In most 
camps in France men take to gardening 
willingly, and require little help or encourage- 
ment. In this camp it was different. 
No one stayed there long enough to be 
interested in the garden. I have seen photo- 
graphs of the camp before I knew it, as it 
was in 1915, a desolate stretch of trampled 
mud. I saw recently a photograph of the 
camp in 1917. It was then gay with flowers. 
I knew it in 1916, when Miss L. had begun 



236 MY THIRD CAMP 

her gardening and was gradually extending 
her flower-beds, creating new borders and 
fencing off small spaces of waste ground 
with wooden palings. 

Her enthusiasm stimulated men, who could 
never hope to see any result of their labours, 
to do something for the camp. One man, 
a miner from Northumberland, set out the 
name of the camp in large letters done in 
white stones on a green bank behind the 
canteen. He gave all his spare time for 
two days to the work, and when he had 
finished we discovered that he had left 
out a letter in the first syllable of the 
name. He was a patient as well- as an 
enthusiastic man. He began all over again. 

Miss L. went to great trouble in providing 
amusements for the men. Here she worked 
against great difficulties. An organisation 
like the Y.M.C.A. has control of concert 
parties and lecturers who are sent round to 
various huts, thus greatly lightening the 
labour of the local workers. The camp 
canteen had no organisation behind it, 
and could command no ready-made enter- 
tainments. In the sweat of our brows we 
earned such concerts as we had, and any 
one who has ever got up a concert, even 
at home, knows how much sweating such 



MY THIRD CAMP 237 

activities involve. In the end, moved by 
pity at our plight, the Y.M.C.A. people 
used to lend us concert parties, especially 
" Lena Ashwell " parties, the best of their 
kind. I have always found the Y.M.C.A. 
generous in sharing their good things with 
those outside their organisation. 

Another difficulty which faced Miss L. 
was the want of any suitable place for enter- 
tainments. The canteen was far too small. 
The Church Army hut, when we had got it 
opened, was a little better, but still not 
nearly large enough for the audience which 
a good concert party drew. We had to use 
the dining-hall. It was not always available 
and was seldom available at the exact time 
we wanted it. It had no stage and no piano. 
Each time a concert was held there, a stage 
had to be erected for the occasion, the 
piano hauled over from the canteen, and some 
kind of decoration arranged. 

One of the minor inconveniences of 
the camp was the extraordinary uncertainty 
of the lighting. Other camps, even the 
Con. Camp occasionally, suffered from failure 
of the supply of electricity. For some 
reason the thing happened more often in 
this camp than elsewhere ; and even when 
the current was running strongly we found 



238 MY THIRD CAMP 

ourselves in darkness because our wires fused 
in places difficult to get at, or branches 
fell from trees and broke wires. We got 
accustomed to these disasters when they 
happened at ordinary times. 

Miss L. and her assistants were ladies of 
resource and indomitable spirit. It was a 
small thing to them to find the canteen 
suddenly plunged into total darkness while 
a crowd of men was clamouring for food 
and drink at the counter. A supply of 
candles was kept ready to hand. They were 
placed in mugs (candlesticks were lacking 
of course) and set on the counter. By the 
aid of their feeble gleam the ladies groped 
their way into the kitchen for tea, filled 
cups, and counted out change. The scene 
always reminded me of Gideon's attack on 
the Midianites when his soldiers carried 
lamps in pitchers. Occasionally some one 
knocked over a mug. There was a crash 
and a blaze, a very fair imitation of the 
battle in the Book of Judges. 

It was worse when a whist drive or a 
singing competition in the Church Army 
hut was interrupted by one of these Egyptian 
plagues of darkness. But even then we 
did not allow ourselves to be seriously 
embarrassed. The men, responsive to the 



MY THIRD CAMP 2S9 

instinct of discipline, sat quiet at the whist 
tables with their cards in their hands. The 
glow of burning cigarettes could be seen, 
faint spots of light ; nothing else. 

Miss L. hurried to the canteen for candles. 
They were set in pools of their own grease 
on the tables and the games went on. A 
singing competition scarcely even paused. 
The competitors sang on. The pianist man- 
aged to play. The audience applauded with 
extra vigour until candles were brought 
and set in rows, like footlights, in front of 
the stage. 

Our worst experience of light failure oc- 
curred one evening when we had a visit 
from a very superior concert party. We 
had secured it only after much " wangling." 
We made every possible preparation for its 
reception. One of Miss L.'s assistants drew 
out a most attractive advertisement of the 
performance with a picture of a beauti- 
ful lady in a red dress at the top of it. 
We posted this up in various parts of 
the camp ; but we were not really anxious 
about the audience. It always " rolled 
up." 

We set up a stage in the dining-room, a 
large high stage made out of dining- tables, 
a little rickety, but considered by good 



210 MY THIRD CAMP 

judges to be fairly safe. We spread a 
carpet, or something which looked like a 
carpet, on it. Only Miss L. could have 
got a carpet in the camp, and I do not 
know how she did it. We hung up a large 
Union Jack, Miss L.'s private property, 
which was used on all festive occasions 
and served as an altar cloth on Sundays. 
The E.F. Canteen authorities were worried 
for a week beforehand, and, lest they should 
be worried more, promised us a new piano, 
" same," so they put it, "to be delivered " 
in time for the concert. The promise was 
not kept. 

That was our first misfortune. With deep 
misgiving we dragged our own piano out 
of the canteen and set it on the stage. 
The musical members of Miss L.'s staff 
assured us that it was desperately out of 
tune. The least musical of us could assure 
ourselves that several notes made no sound 
at all, however hard you hit them. And 
the concert party was a very grand one. 

It arrived in two motors, and we abased 
ourselves before it, babbling apologies. One 
after another the members of the party 
approached our piano and poked at it with 
their forefingers. One after another they 
turned away looking depressed. The only 



MY THIRD CAMP 241 

one of them who remained moderately cheer- 
ful was a man who did conjuring tricks. 
It was, I imagine, through his good offices 
that the party agreed to attempt its pro- 
gramme. 

The audience, who knew the failings of 
our piano as well as we did, applauded the 
first song rapturously. Then without the 
slightest warning every lamp in the place 
went out. A dog, a well-beloved creature 
called Detail, who was accustomed to sit 
under Miss L.'s chair at concerts, began to 
bark furiously. That, I think, was what 
finally broke the temper of the concert 
party. We had an oil lamp ready for emer- 
gencies. It was lit, and I saw the leader of 
the party beckoning to me. His face was 
fearfully stern. I fully expected him to 
say that the whole party would leave at 
once. 

But he did nothing so drastic. He de- 
manded the instant expulsion of Detail. 
There was a scuffie at the far end of the 
room. The audience rose to its feet and 
cheered tumultuously. Detail, I am sorry 
to say, barked again. I saw eight men 
staggering through the crowded room bearing 
a piano. It was quite new, and, I am told, 
almost in tune. The situation was saved, 
l<3 



242 MY THIRD CAMP 

The singers were mollified and went on 
with their programme by the light of one 
lamp, two candles (on the piano), and 
three stable lanterns. An orderly with a 
screwdriver and a box of matches sought 
for the fused wire. Detail crept under her 
mistress's chair again unrebuked. She was 
an animal of cultivated tastes and hated 
missing concerts. She usually behaved with 
decorum, not barking except by way of 
applause when the audience shouted and 
noise of any kind was legitimate. 

The camp is, I am told, very different 
now. There is a new canteen, large, well 
furnished, and beautiful. Concerts can 
be held in it and church services. No 
one is any longer crowded out of any- 
thing. The kitchen is a spacious place in 
which it is possible to cook without great 
physical suffering. There are more flower- 
beds, well-kept lines between the tents, an 
impressive entrance. No doubt even the 
electric light shines consistently. The days 
of makeshift are over and the camp is a 
credit to the Expeditionary Force. 

But I should not like to go back there 
again. I should be haunted with memories 
of old days which were trying but pleasant. 
I should wish myself back at one of the 



MY THIRD CAMP 243 

cheery tea-parties in the old canteen kitchen, 
when we sat on packing-cases and biscuit- 
boxes, when we shifted our seats about 
to dodge the raindrops from the roof, 
when we drank out of three cracked 
cups and thick mugs borrowed from the 
canteen. 

I should remember pay-nights when the 
men stood before the counter in a dense 
mob, all hungry, each holding in his hand 
a five-franc note, when we had no change, 
not a franc, not a sou; when, in despera- 
tion, I used to volunteer to collect change 
from any one who had it, giving chits in 
exchange for small coins. Such crises do 
not arise now, I suppose. 

Sitting in comfort at a table in the fine 
new canteen I should remember sadly a wet 
afternoon in the Church Army hut when 
there was no room to move and the air was 
heavy with Woodbine smoke and the steam 
of drying cloth, when I perched on the 
corner of a window-sill and pitted myself 
against a chess player who challenged me 
suddenly and turned out to be a master of 
the game and the secretary of a chess club 
in Yorkshire. 

I should remember, with how great regret ! 
how, evening after evening, Miss S. left her 



244 MY THIRD CAMP 

pots and pans, smoothed her tousled over- 
all, and came over to the Church Army hut 
to play a hymn for us at evening prayers; 
how the men, an ever-changing congregation, 
chose the same hymns night after night till 
we came to hate the sound of their tunes ; 
how we, reserving Sunday evenings for our 
property, chose the hymn then and always 
chose the same one — which I shall never sing 
again without remembering Miss S. at the 
piano, smelling the air of that hut, and being 
troubled by a vision of the faces of the men 
who sang. 

I should not find Miss S. there if I went 
back, or Captain L., or any one, almost, 
whom I knew. No doubt their successors 
are doing well, mine better than ever I did, 
which would be no difficult thing ; but I 
could not bear to see them at their work. 
Ghosts of old days would haunt me. 

And worst of all, Miss L. is gone. The 
rest of us have passed and no one misses 
us much, I suppose. Our places are easily 
filled. Her place in that camp no one will 
ever quite fill. " Many daughters have done 
virtuously, but thou excellest them all." 



CHAPTER XVI 

LEAVE 

At last ! I have the precious paper safe 
in my hand, in my pocket with a button 
fastened tight to keep it there : my leave 
warrant, passport to ten days' liberty, rest, 
and — other things much more desirable than 
liberty or rest. It is issued to me late on 
Sunday night for a start on Monday morning. 
The authorities are desperately suspicious. 
They trust no man's honour. They treat 
even a padre as if he were a fraudulent 
cashier, bent on cheating them if he can. 
I do not blame them. In this matter of 
leave every man is a potential swindler. 
A bishop would cheat if he could. If I had 
got that leave warrant an hour or two sooner 
than I did, I should have made a push for 
the boat which left on Sunday evening. 
Thereby I should have deprived the army 
of my services during the night, a form of 
swindling not to be tolerated, though what 

245 



246 LEAVE 

use I am to the army or any one else when 
I am in bed and asleep it would be very 
difficult to say. 

All that night the wind shrieked, rattling 
windows to the discomfort of those who were 
lucky enough to have roofs over their heads, 
threatening the dwellers in tents with the 
utter destruction of their shelters. Very 
early, before the dawn of the winter morn- 
ing, the rain began, not to fall — the rain in 
a full gale of wind does not fall — but to 
sweep furiously across the town. 

I heard it, but I did not care. I turned 
and snuggled close under my blankets. In 
an hour or two it would be time to get up. 
My day would begin, the glorious first day 
of leave. What does rain matter ? or what 
do gales matter ? unless — a horrid fear 
assailed me. Was it possible that in such 
a gale the steamer would fail to start. I 
turned and twisted, tortured by the thought. 
Every time the windows rattled and the 
house shook I sweated hot and cold. 

In the end, tormented beyond endurance, 
I got up and dressed some time between 
5 a.m. and 6 a.m. I did more. Without 
the coffee which Madame had promised me 
I sallied forth and tramped through the 
deserted streets of the town, fording gutters 



LEAVE 247 

which were brooks, skirting close by walls 
which promised what sailors call a " lee." 

The long stretch of the quay was desolate. 
Water lay in deep pools between the railway 
lines among the sleepers. Water trickled 
from deserted waggons and fell in small 
cascades from the roofs of sheds. The 
roadway, crossed and recrossed by the rail- 
way, had little muddy lakes on it and broad 
stretches of mud rather thicker than the 
water of the lakes. 

Far down the quay lay a steamer with two 
raking funnels — the leave boat, the ship of 
heart's desire for many men. Clouds of 
smoke, issuing defiantly from her funnels, 
were immediately swept sideways by the 
wind and beaten down by the rain. The 
smoke ceased to be smoke, became a duller 
greyness added to the greyness of the air, 
dissolved into smuts and was carried to 
earth — or to the faces and hands of way- 
farers — by the rain. 

Already at 7 o'clock there were men 
going along the quay — a steady stream of 
them, tramping, splashing, stumbling to- 
wards the steamer. In the matter of the 
sailing of leave boats rumour is the sole 
informant, and rumour had it that this boat 
would start at 10 a.m. Leave is a precious 



248 LEAVE 

thing. He takes no risks who has secured 
the coveted pass to Blighty. It is a small 
matter to wait three hours on a rain-swept 
quay. It would be a disaster beyond 
imagining to miss the boat. 

Officers make for the boat in twos or 
threes, their trench coats, buttoned tightly, 
flap round putteed or gaitered legs. Drenched 
haversacks hang from their shoulders. 

Parties of men, fully burdened with rifles 
and kit, march down from the rest camp 
where they have spent the night. The mud 
of the trenches is still thick on them. One 
here and there wears his steel helmet. They 
carry all sorts of strange packages, sacks 
tied at the mouth, parcels sewed up in 
sacking, German helmets slung on knapsacks, 
valueless trophies of battlefields, loot from 
captured dug-outs, pathetically foolish sou- 
venirs bought in French shops, all to be 
presented to the wives, mothers, sweethearts 
who wait at home. 

A couple of army sisters, lugging suit- 
cases, clinging to the flying folds of their 
grey cloaks, walk, bent forward against the 
wind and rain. A blue-coated Canadian 
nurse, brass stars on her shoulder straps, 
has given an arm to a V.A.D. girl, a creature 
already terrified at the prospect of crossing 



LEAVE 249 

the sea on such a day. The rain streams 
down their faces, but perhaps Canadians 
are accustomed to worse rain in their own 
country. Certainly this young woman does 
not seem to mind it. She is smiling and 
walks jauntily. Like many of our cousins 
from overseas she is rich in splendid vitality. 

A heavy grey motor rushes along, splashing 
the walkers. Beside the driver is a pile of 
luggage. Inside, secure behind plate glass 
from any weather, sits a general. Another 
motor follows and still others. British staff 
officers and military attaches from allied 
nations, the privileged classes of the war, 
sweep by while humbler men splash and 
stumble. 

But in front of the gangway of the leave 
boat, as at the gates of Paradise, there is no 
distinction of persons. The mean man and 
the mighty find the same treatment there. 
There comes a moment when the car must 
be left, when crossed sword and baton on 
the shoulder straps avail their wearer no 
more than a single star. 

A sailor, relentless as Rhadamanthus, 
stands on the gangway and bars the way to 
the shelter of the ship. No one — so the order 
has gone forth — is to be allowed on board 
before 9 o'clock. There is shelter a few 



250 LEAVE 

yards behind, a shed. A few seek it. I 
prefer to stand, with other early comers, 
in a cluster round the end of the gangway, 
determined, though we wait hours, to be 
among the first on board. 

The crowd grows denser as time goes on. 
The Canadian sister, alert and competent, 
secures a seat on the rail of a disused gang- 
way and plants two neat feet on the rail 
opposite. An Australian captain, gallant 
amid extreme adversity, offers the spare 
waterproof he carries to the shivering V.A.D. 
I find myself wedged tight against a general. 
He is elderly, grizzled, and looks fierce ; but 
he accepts a light for his cigarette from the 
bowl of my pipe. It was his only chance of 
getting a light then and there. Now and 
then some one asks a neighbour whether it 
is likely that the boat will start on such a 
day. 

A depressed major on the outskirts of 
the crowd says that he has it on the best 
authority that the port is closed and that 
there will be no sailings for a week. The 
news travels from mouth to mouth, but no 
one stirs. There is a horrid possibility that 
it may be true ; but — well, most men know 
the reputation of that " best authority." 
He is the kind of liar of whose fate St. John 



LEAVE 251 

speaks vigorously in the last chapter but 
one of his Apocalypse. 

The ship rises slowly higher and higher, 
for the tide is flowing. The gangway grows 
steeper. From time to time two sailors 
shift it slightly, retying the ropes which 
fasten it to the ship's rail. The men on 
the quay watch the manoeuvre hopefully. 

At 9 o'clock an officer appears on the 
outside fringe of the crowd. With a civility 
which barely cloaks his air of patronage 
he demands way for himself to the ship. 
His brassard wins him all he asks at once. 
On it are the letters " A.M.L.O." He is the 
Assistant Military Landing Officer, and for 
the moment is lord of all, the arbiter of 
things more important than life and death. 
In private life he is perhaps a banker's clerk 
or an insurance agent. On the battlefield 
his rank entitles him to such consideration 
only as is due to a captain. Here he may 
ignore colonels, may say to a brigadier, 
" Stop pushing." He has what all desire, 
the " Open Sesame " which clears the way 
to the ship. 

He goes on board, acknowledging with 
careless grace the salute of one of the ship's 
officers. He stands on the shelter deck. 

With calm dignity he surveys the swaying 



252 LEAVE 

crowd beneath him. " There's no hurry, 
gentlemen," he says. There is no hurry 
for him. He has risen from his bed at a 
reasonable hour, has washed, shaved, bathed, 
breakfasted. He has not stood for hours in 
drenching rain. The look of him is too 
much for the general who is wedged beside 
me in the crowd. He speaks : 

" What the ? Why the ? When 

the ? Where the ?" He is a man 

of fluent speech, this general. I thought as 
much when I first looked at him. Now it 
seems that his command of language is a 
great gift, more valuable than the eloquence 
of statesmen or the music of poets. The 
Canadian sister leads the applause of the 
crowd. The general turns to me with a 
deprecating smile. 

" Excuse me, padre, but really " 

The army respects the Church, knows that 
certain necessary forms of speech are not 
suited to clerical ears. But the Church is 
human and can sympathise with men's 
infirmities. 

" If I were a general," I said, " I should 
say a lot more." 

The general, encouraged by this absolution, 
does say more. He mentions the fact that 
he is going straight to the War Office when 



LEAVE 253 

he reaches London. Once there he will — 
the threat vaporises into jets of language 
so terrific that the air round us grows 
sensibly warmer. I notice that the V.A.D. 
is holding tight to the hand of the Canadian 
sister. 

The A.M.L.O., peering through the rain 
from the shelter deck of the steamer, recog- 
nises the rank of his assailant. The mention 
of the War Office reaches him. He wilts 
visibly. The stiffness goes out of him before 
the delighted eyes of the crowd. He admits 
us to the ship. Another gangway is lowered. 
In two thin streams the damp men and 
draggled women struggle on board. Certain 
officers, the more helpless subalterns among 
us, are detailed for duty on the voyage. 
They parade on the upper deck. To them 
at least the A.M.L.O. can still speak with 
authority. He explains to the bewildered 
youths what their duties are. Each 
passenger, so it appears, must wear a life- 
belt. It is the business of the subalterns 
to see that every one ties round his chest 
one of those bandoliers of cork. 

On the leave boat the spirit of democracy 
is triumphant. Sergeants jostle commis- 
sioned officers. Subalterns seize deck chairs 
desired by colonels of terrific dignity. Pri- 



254 LEAVE 

vates with muddy trousers crowd the sofas 
of the first-class saloon. Discipline we may 
suppose survives. If peril threatened, men 
would fall into their proper places and words 
of command would be obeyed. But the 
outward forms of discipline are for a time 
in abeyance. The spirit of goodfellowship 
prevails. The common joy — an intensified 
form of the feeling of the schoolboy on the 
first day of the Christmas holidays — makes 
one family of all ranks and ages. 

No doubt also the sea insists on the 
recognition of new standards of worth. The 
humblest private who is not seasick is visibly 
and unmistakably a better man than a 
field- marshal with his head over the bulwarks. 
Curious and ill-assorted groups are formed. 
Men who at other times would not speak 
to each other are drawn and even squeezed 
together by the pressure of circumstance. 

Between two of the deckhouses on the 
lower deck of this steamer is a narrow pass- 
age. Porters have packed valises and other 
luggage into it. It is sheltered from the 
rain and will be secure from showers of 
flying spray. Careless and inexperienced 
travellers, searching along the crowded decks 
for somewhere to sit down, pass this place 
by unnoticed. Others, accustomed in old 



LEAVE 255 

days to luxurious travelling, scorn it and 
seek for comfort which they never find. 

I come on this nook by accident ; and at 
once perceive its value as a place of shelter 
and refuge. I sit down on the deck with 
my haversack beside me. I wedge myself 
securely, my feet against one side of the 
passage, my back against the other. I tuck 
my waterproof round me and feel that I 
may defy fate to do its worst. 

A few others drift into the refuge, or are 
pressed in by the crowd outside. The 
Canadian sister, a competent young woman, 
has found her way here and settled down 
her helpless V.A.D. on a valise — a lumpy, 
uncomfortable seat. A private from a 
Scottish regiment is here, two Belgians and 
a Russian staff officer struggle in a narrow 
space to adjust their life-belts. A brigadier, 
a keen- eyed, eager-faced young man, one 
of those to whom the war has given oppor- 
tunity and advancement, joins the group. 
He speaks in French to the Belgians and 
the Russian. He helps to make the V.A.D. 
less utterly uncomfortable. He offers me 
his flask and then a cigar. 

There is one subject of conversation. 
Will the boat start ? The Russian is hope- 
ful. Is not England mistress of the seas ? 



256 LEAVE 

The V.A.D. is despondent. Once before in 
a long-ago time of leave the boat did not 
start. The passengers, and she among them, 
were disembarked. The Scottish private 
has heard from a friend of his in " the 
Signals " that German submarines are abroad 
in the Channel. The brigadier is openly 
contemptuous of all information from men 
in " the Signals." The Canadian sister is 
cheerful. If she were captain of the ship, 
she says, she would start, and, what is more, 
fetch up at the other side. 

The captain, it appears, shares her spirit. 
The ship does start. The harbour is cleared 
and at once the tossing begins. The party 
between the deckhouses sways and reels. 
It becomes clear very soon that it will 
be impossible to stand. But sitting down 
is difficult. I have to change my attitude. 
It is not possible for any one else to sit 
down if I keep my legs stretched out, and 
the others must sit down or else fall. The 
brigadier warns the Russian to be careful 
how he bestows himself. 

" Don't put your feet on my haversack," 
he says. " There's a bottle of hair-wash in 
it." 

The Russian shifts his feet. 

" There'll be a worse spill if you trample 



LEAVE 25? 

on mine," I murmur. " There's a bottle of 
Benedictine in it." 

" Padre ! " said the brigadier. " I'm 
ashamed of you. / had the decency to call 
it hair-wash." 

The Canadian sister laughs loud and 
joyously. 

It is noticed that the Scottish private is 
becoming white. Soon his face is worse 
than white. It is greyish green. The 
Canadian sister tucks her skirts under her. 
The prospect is horrible. There is no room 
for the final catastrophe of seasickness. 
The brigadier is a man of prompt decision. 

" Out you go," he says to the man. " Off 
with you and put your head over the side." 

I feel that I must bestir myself for the 
good of the little party, though I do not 
want to move. I seize the helpless Scot 
by the arm and push him out. The next 
to succumb is the Russian staff officer. His 
face is pallid and his lips blue. The V.A.D. 
is past caring what happens. The two 
Belgians are indifferent. The Canadian 
sister, the brigadier, and I take silent counsel. 
Our eyes meet. 

" I can't talk French," I say. 

" I can," said the Brigadier. 

He does. He explains politely to the 
17 



258 LEAVE 

Russian the indecency of being seasick in 
that crowded space. He points out that 
there is one course only open to the sufferer 
— to go away and bear the worst elsewhere. 
Honour calls for the sacrifice. The Russian 
opens his eyes feebly and looks at the deck 
beyond the narrow limits of his refuge. It 
is swept at the moment by a shower of spray. 
He shudders and closes his eyes again. The 
brigadier persuades, exhorts, commands. 
The Russian shakes his head and intimates 
that he neither speaks nor understands 
French. He is a brave and gallant gentle- 
man. Shells cannot terrify him, nor the 
fiercest stuttering of the field guns make 
him hesitate in advance, but in a certain 
stage of seasickness the ears of very heroes 
are deaf to duty's call. 

A little later I take the cigar from my 
mouth and crush the glowing end on the 
deck. I am not seasick, but there are times 
when tobacco loses its attractiveness. The 
brigadier becomes strangely silent. His head 
shrinks down into the broad upturned collar 
of his coat. Only the Canadian sister re- 
mains cheerfully buoyant, her complexion 
as fresh, her cheeks as pink as when the 
rain washed them on the quay. 

The throbbing of the engines ceases. For 



LEAVE 250 

a brief time the ship wallows in the rolling 
seas. Then she begins to move backwards 
towards the breakwater of the harbour. 
The brigadier struggles to his feet and peers 
out. 

"England at last," he says. "Thank 
goodness." 

Women, officers, and men fling off the life- 
belts they have worn and crowd to the 
gangways. With shameless eagerness they 
push their way ashore. The voyage is over. 

Along the pier long trains are drawn up 
waiting for us. We crowd into them ; lucky 
men, or foreseeing men with seats engaged 
beforehand, fill the Pullman cars of the train 
which starts first. It runs through the 
sweet familiar English country incredibly 
swiftly and smoothly. Luncheon is served 
to us. On this train, at least, there still are 
restaurant cars. We eat familiar food and 
wonder that we ever in the old days grumbled 
at railway fare. We lie back, satisfied, and 
smoke. 

But there is in us an excitement which 
even tobacco will not soothe. The train 
goes swiftly, but not half swiftly enough. 
We pass town and hamlet. Advertisement 
hoardings, grotesque flat images of cows, 
outrageous commendations of whisky or 



260 LEAVE 

pills, appear in^the fields. We are getting 
near London. Pipes are laid by. We fidget 
and fret. The houses we pass are closer 
together, get closer still, merge into a sea 
of grey- slated roofs. The air is thick, smoke- 
laden. The train slows down, stops, starts 
again, draws up finally by the long platform. 

Then ! To every man his own dreams 

of heaven hereafter. To every man his own 
way of spending his leave. 



CHAPTER XVII 

A HOLIDAY 

Holidays, common enough in civil life, are 
rare joys in the B.E.F. Leave is obtainable 
occasionally. But nobody speaks of leave 
as " holidays." It is a thing altogether 
apart. It is almost sacred. It is too thrill- 
ing, too rapturous to be compared to any- 
thing we knew before the war. We should 
be guilty of a kind of profanity if we spoke 
of leave as " holidays." It ought to have 
a picturesque and impressive name of its 
own ; but no one has found or even attempted 
to find an adequate name for it. If we were 
pagans instead of professing to be Christians, 
if we danced round fountains and set up 
statues of Pan for our worship and knew 
nothing of the Hebrew spirit, we might 
get a name for " leave " out of the vocabu- 
lary of our religious life. Being what we are 
we cannot do that, but we rightly decline to 
compare leave with ordinary holidays. 
Only a few men in the army succeed in 

361 



262 A HOLIDAY 

getting what is properly called a holiday, 
a day or two off work with a change of 
scene. I got one, thanks to M. It is one 
of the many things, perhaps the least of 
them, for which I have to thank his friend- 
ship. 

M. had formed an exaggerated, I fear a 
totally erroneous, idea of my powers of enter- 
taining men. It occurred to him that it 
would be a good thing if I gave lectures to 
the men of the cavalry brigade to which he 
was attached. What he said to the general 
who commanded the division I do not know, 
but somehow, between the general and M., 
the thing was worked. I found myself with 
a permit to travel on railways otherwise 
barred to me and three golden days before me. 

No one can say that life in my three camps 
was dull. Life is never dull or monotonous 
for a man who has plenty of pleasant work 
to do and a party of good friends as fellow- 
workers. But a change is always agreeable, 
and I looked forward to my trip with im- 
patient excitement. 

It was like being a schoolboy again and 
going forth to the Crystal Palace with money 
in my pocket, an entire half-crown, to be 
dribbled away in pennyworths of sherbet 
and visits to curious side-shows. That party 



A HOLIDAY 263 

was an annual affair for us that came in 
June as a celebration of the Queen's birthday. 
My visit to M. was in August, but the weather 
was still full summer. 

As a lecturing tour that expedition was 
a flat failure. M.'s cavalry, officers and 
men, were frankly bored and I realised from 
the very start that I was not going to justify 
whatever M. said to the general about me. 

In every other respect the holiday was 
a success. I enjoyed it enormously and I 
gained some very interesting experience. I 
saw French rural life, a glimpse of it. Cavalry 
cannot be concentrated in large camps as 
infantry are. When they are not wanted 
for fighting they are scattered in small 
parties over some country district where 
they can get water and proper accommoda- 
tion for their horses. The men are billeted 
in farm-houses. The officers live in chateaux 
and mess in the dining-halls of French country 
gentlemen if such accommodation is avail- 
able, or take over two or three houses in a 
village, sleep where they can and mess in 
the best room which the interpreter and 
the billeting officer can find. 

M. slept in a farm-house and secured a 
room adjoining his for my use. I slept on 
the softest and most billowy feather bed I 



264 A HOLIDAY 

have ever come across, with another feather 
bed, also very soft and billowy, over me by 
way of covering. My room had an earthen 
floor, a window which would not open, a 
broken chair and no other furniture of any 
kind. I do not think that our landlady, 
the wife of a farmer who was with the colours, 
had removed her furniture from the room 
to keep it out of my way. That almost 
bare room was just her idea of what a bed- 
room ought to be. Her kitchen and such 
other rooms as I saw in her house were 
equally bare. 

Unlike the French women whom I met 
in towns, this farmer's wife was a slattern. 
She cared neither about her own appearance 
nor the look of her house. She did not wash 
her children. But she worked. The land 
was well tilled and her cattle well tended. 
There was no sign of neglect in the fields. 
Things might have been a little better, 
perhaps, the place more efficiently worked, 
if her husband had been at home, but there 
was not room for much improvement. Yet 
that woman had no one to help her except 
a very old man, her father-in-law, I think, 
who was infirm and almost imbecile. 

She had four children, but they were 
hindrances rather than helps. The eldest 



A HOLIDAY 265 

of them was about eight years old. She 
did the whole work of the farm herself. I 
used to hear her getting up at 4 a.m., 
lighting a fire and opening doors. Peeping 
through the half-transparent pane of glass 
in my tiny window, I saw her tending her 
horse and cows before 5 a.m. She worked 
on, and worked hard, all day. 

The French have not had to face the 
difficulty of the "one-man business" as 
we have, because the women of the minor 
bourgeoisie are willing and able to step 
straight into their husbands' places and 
carry on. I learnt that when I lived in 
towns. The French can go farther in calling 
up the men who work the land, because 
their peasant women can do the work of 
men. The land suffers, I suppose, and the 
harvests are poorer than in peace time. But 
if farms in England were left manless as 
those French farms are, the result would be 
much more serious in spite of the gallant 
efforts of the girls who "go on the land." 

M. and I tramped about that country a 
great deal while I was with him. We saw 
the same things everywhere, cattle well 
cared for and land well worked by a few 
old men and women who looked old long 
before their time. 



266 A HOLIDAY 

Our landlady cannot have been an old 
woman. Her youngest child was a baby 
in a cradle, but she looked fifty or more. 
Loss of youth and beauty is a heavy price 
for a woman to pay for anything. I wonder 
if she resented having to pay it. At least 
she has the satisfaction of knowing that 
she bought something worth while though 
she paid dearly. She kept her home. She 
fed her children. As surely as her husband 
in the trenches she helped to save her country. 

I have been assured that the French 
women have not been so successful as Eng- 
lish women in the conduct of war charities. 
They have not rushed into the hospitals to 
nurse the wounded with anything like the 
enthusiasm and devotion of our V.A.D.'s. 
In the organisation of War Work Depots 
and the dispatching of parcels to prisoners 
of war the French women have proved 
themselves on the whole less efficient than 
English women. They have not shone in 
the management of public business, where 
Englishwomen have been unexpectedly able 
and devoted. 

On the other hand French women seem 
to have done better than English women 
in the conduct of their private affairs. This, 
I think, is true both of the bourgeois and 



A HOLIDAY 267 

peasant classes. In England the earning 
power on which the house depends is the 
man's. When he is taken away he is very 
badly missed and the home suffers or even 
collapses. In France the women are more 
independent economically. They can carry 
on the business or the farm sufficiently well 
without the man. 

But I did not get permission to visit M.'s 
cavalry division that I might observe the 
French peasantry. I went to give lectures 
to the men. I did that, faithfully exerting 
myself to the uttermost, but I did it very 
badly. I suppose I am not adaptable. 
Certainly the conditions under which I 
lectured destroyed any faint chance of my 
succeeding, before I began. 

It has been my lot to lecture under various 
circumstances to widely different kinds of 
audiences. I have been set up at the end 
of a drawing-room in a house of culture 
in the middle west of the U.S.A. I have 
stood beside a chairman on a platform in 
an English hall. Never before had I been 
called upon to lecture in a large open field, 
standing in the sunlight, while my audience 
reclined peacefully on the grass under a 
grove of trees. Never before had I watched 
my audience marched up to me^by squadrons, 



268 A HOLIDAY 

halted in front of me by the stern voices of 
sergeants, and sitting down, or lying down, 
only after I had invited them to do so. It 
was a very hot afternoon. I do not wonder 
that half the men went to sleep. I should 
have liked to sleep too. 

I lectured that same day in another field 
to a different body of men. There I was 
even more uncomfortable. Two thoughtful 
sergeants borrowed a table from a neigh- 
bouring house and I stood on it. That 
audience stayed awake, perhaps in hope of 
seeing me fall off the table, but made no 
pretence of enjoying the lecture. 

Yet it was not altogether the strange 
conditions of the performance which worried 
me. I should, I think, have come to grief 
just as badly with those audiences if they 
had been collected into rooms or halls. I 
was out of touch with the men I was talking 
to. I did not understand them or how to 
address them. I had some experience, ex- 
perience of six months or so, of soldiers ; 
but that was no help to me. These were 
soldiers of a kind quite new to me. They 
belonged to the old army. Officers and 
men alike were professionals, not amateurs 
soldiering by chance like the rest of us. 

The cavalry is, with the possible exception 



A HOLIDAY 269 

of the Guards, the only part of our force in 
which the spirit of the old army survives. 
Every infantry battalion has been destroyed 
and renewed so often since the war began 
that the original personality of the thing, 
the sense of memory, the link with the past 
and all its traditions, no longer survives. 
An infantry regiment bears an old name ; 
but it is a new thing. Its resemblance to 
the regiment which bore the name before the 
war is superficial, a thin veneer. In spirit, 
outlook, tone, interest, tradition, in all but 
courage and patriotism, it is different. In the 
cavalry this great change has not taken place. 

The cavalry suffered heavily in the early 
days of the war and has lost many men since. 
Large numbers of recruits have come in 
to make good the losses. But the number 
of new men has never been so great as to 
destroy the old regiment's power of ab- 
sorption. Recruits have been digested by 
the original body. They have grown up 
in the tradition of the regiment and have 
been formed by its spirit. The difference 
between the cavalry troopers and the in- 
fantry privates of the army of to-day is 
difficult to define ; but it is very easily 
felt and plain to recognise. 

Perhaps it is most clearly seen in the 



270 A HOLIDAY 

attitude of men towards their officers. In 
the old army officers were a class apart. 
Everything that could be done was done to 
emphasise the distinction between officers 
and men. And the distinction was a real, 
not an artificial thing. The officer was 
different from the men he commanded. He 
belonged to a different class. He had been 
educated in a different way. He was accus- 
tomed before he joined the army and after 
he left it to live a life utterly unlike the 
life of the men he commanded. It can 
scarcely have been necessary to deepen by 
disciplinary means the strong, clear line 
between officers and men. 

In the new army all that can be done by 
regulations is done to keep up the idea of the 
officer super class. But the distinction now 
is an artificial one, not a real one. Neither in 
education, social class, manner of life, wealth, 
nor any other accident are our new officers 
distinct from the men they command. 

For the men of the old army the officer 
was a leader because he was recognisably in 
some sense a superior. He might be a 
good officer or a poor one, brave and efficient 
or the reverse. Whatever his personal 
qualities he was an officer, a natural leader. 

For the men of the new army an officer 



A HOLIDAY 271 

is an officer more or less by accident. No 
one recognises any kind of divine right to 
leadership. Discipline may insist, does quite 
rightly insist, on due respect to officers as 
such ; but everybody feels and knows that 
this is a mere question of expediency. Men 
cannot act together unless some one com- 
mands ; but it does not follow that the man 
who gives the orders is in any permanent 
way the superior of the men who receive 
them. 

What has really happened during the war 
is that the army has changed in the essential 
spirit of its organisation. It is no longer 
built on the aristocratic principle like the 
army of Louis XIV. It has been demo- 
cratised and is approximating to the type 
of Napoleon's armies or Cromwell's Ironsides. 
The shell of the old organisation is there 
still. The life within the shell is different. 

I do not know how the men of the old 
army regarded their generals and officers in 
high command. If we may trust Kipling 
they had, sometimes at least, a feeling of 
strong personal affection and admiration 
for certain commanders. 

" He's little, but he's wise, 
And he does not advertise, 
Do you, Bobs ? " 



272 A HOLIDAY 

Very likely the cavalry men still have this 
kind of feeling for their generals. The men 
of the brigade I visited certainly ought to 
have loved their general. He did a great 
deal for them. But the new army does 
not seem to have any feeling either of respect 
or contempt for its generals. 

Nothing surprised me more when I became 
intimate with the men than their attitude 
towards their commanding officers. I had 
read of the devotion of armies to their 
leaders. We are told how Napoleon's soldiers 
idolised him ; how Wellington's men be- 
lieved in him so that they were prepared to 
follow him anywhere, confident in his genius. 
Misled by newspaper correspondents, I sup- 
posed that I should find this sort of thing 
common in France. I had often read of 
this general and that as beloved or trusted 
by his men. 

In fact no such spirit exists. Very often 
the men do not know the name of the com- 
mander of the particular army, or even the 
brigade, to which they belong ; so little has 
the personality of the general impressed 
itself on the men. Very often I used to 
meet evidences of personal loyalty to a 
junior officer, a company commander, or a 
subaltern. Occasionally men have the same 



A HOLIDAY 278 

feeling about a colonel. They never seem 
to go beyond that. There was not a trace 
of admiration for or confidence in any one 
in high command. It was not that the 
men distrusted their generals or disliked 
them. Their attitude was generally neutral. 
They knew nothing and cared very little 
about generals. 

Perhaps men never did idolise generals, 
and historians, like newspaper correspon- 
dents, are simply inventing pretty myths 
when they tell us about the hero worship 
paid to Napoleon, Wellington, and the 
rest. 

Perhaps the fact is that the conditions of 
modern warfare tend to obscure the glory 
of a general. He can no longer prance 
about on a horse in front of lines of gaping 
men, proudly contemptuous of the cannon 
balls which come bounding across the field 
of battle from the enemy's artillery. His 
men are inclined to forget his existence, 
usually do remain ignorant of his name 
because they do not see him. One is 
tempted to wonder whether the formal — 
and very wearisome — inspections which are 
held from time to time behind the lines, 
generally on cold and rainy days, are not 
really pathetic efforts of kings and generals 
18 



274 A HOLIDAY 

to assert themselves, to get somehow into 
the line of vision of the fighting men. 

Perhaps it may be that generals, through 
no fault of their own, have lost that " plaguy 
trick of winning victories " which bound the 
heart of Dugald Dalgetty to Gustavus Adol- 
phus. Victories, so far as we can see, are 
things which do not occur in modern war- 
fare, or, at all events, do not occur on the 
western front. If any one did win a victory 
of the old-fashioned kind it is quite possible 
that he might become the hero of the soldier. 

It would be very interesting to know what 
the feelings of soldiers of other armies are 
towards their generals. The German people 
seem to idolise von Hindenburg. Have the 
German soldiers any kind of confidence in 
his star ? Von Mackensen has some brilliant 
exploits to his credit. Does Fritz, drafted 
into a regiment commanded by him, march 
forward serenely confident of victory ? 

Our men do no such thing. They have 
unshaken confidence in themselves. They 
are sure that their company commanders 
will not fail them or their colonels let them 
down. But they have no kind of feeling, 
good or bad, about their generals. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

PADRES 

The name "padre" as used in the army de- 
scribes every kind of commissioned chaplain, 
Church of England, Roman Catholic, Pres- 
byterian, or Nonconformist. The men lump 
them all together. I have heard a distinction 
made between " pukka " padres and those 
who have not enjoyed the advantages of 
episcopal ordination. But such denomina- 
tional feeling is extremely rare. As a rule 
a padre is a padre, an officially recognised 
representative of religion, whatever church 
he belongs to. The same kind of character, 
the same general line of conduct, are expected 
in all padres. We shall get a side light, if 
no more, on the much-discussed question of 
the religion of the army if we can arrive at 
an understanding of the way in which the 
padre strikes the average man. 

The statistical method of arriving at 
knowledge is chiefly useful for purposes of 

275 



276 PADRES 

controversy. Any one with access to official 
records might set out for admiration the 
hierarchy of padres, ranging from the Chap- 
lain-General to the humble C.F. Fourth 
Class, might enumerate the confirmations 
held, the candidates presented, the buildings 
erected, perhaps the sermons preached. It 
would then be possible to prove that the 
Church is doing her duty by the soldiers or 
that the Church is failing badly, whichever 
seemed desirable to prove at the moment. 

That is the great advantage of the statisti- 
cal method. It establishes beyond all possi- 
bility of contradiction the thing you want 
to establish. But if you do not want to 
establish anything, if you merely want to 
find out something, statistics are no use at 
all. You are driven to other ways of getting 
at the truth, ways much less definite and 
accurate. 

I wish there were more pictures of army 
chaplains. There are a few. I do not 
recollect that Bairnsfather ever gave us 
one, but they turn up from time to time in 
the pages of Punch. There was one in which 
a senior curate in uniform — the story is 
told in France of a much more august person 
— is represented waving a farewell to a party 
of French soldiers, expressing the hope que 



PADRES 277 

U bon Dieu vous blesserait toujours. We 
need not concern ourselves with his French. 
Staff officers and even generals have made 
less excusable blunders. 

What is interesting is the figure and face 
of the young man. He is alert and plainly 
very energetic. He is full of the spirit of 
comradeship. One glance at him convinces 
you that he means to be helpful in every 
possible way to every human being he comes 
across. He is not going to shirk. He is 
certainly not going to funk. You feel sure 
as you look at him that he will keep things 
going at a sing-song, that a canteen under 
his management will be efficiently run. He 
is a very different man indeed from that 
pre-war curate of Punches whose egg has 
become proverbial, or that other who con- 
fided to an admiring lady that, when preach- 
ing, he liked every fold of his surplice to 
tell. He is not intellectual, but he is 
not, in practical matters, by any means a 
fool. 

His sermons will be commonplace, but — 
you congratulate yourself on this — they 
will certainly be short, and he will neither 
be surprised nor hurt if nobody listens to 
them. There will be nothing mawkish about 
his religion and he will not obtrude it over 



278 PADRES 

much, but when he starts the men singing 
" Fight the good fight," that hymn will go 
with a swing. In the officers' mess, when 
the shyness of the first few days has worn 
off, he will be recognised as " a good sort." 
The men's judgment, expressed in the can- 
teen after a football match, will differ from 
the officers' by one letter only. The padre 
will be classed as " a good sport." 

There are other sketches of padres, and 
they do not always represent men of the 
senior-curate age. There is one, for instance, 
which serves as an advertisement of a 
tobacco, in which the chaplain is a man of 
forty or forty- five. Before the war he must 
have been vicar of a fair-sized parish, very 
well organised. And it is not always the 
" good sort " qualities which the artist 
emphasises. There is a suggestion occa- 
sionally of a certain stiffness, a moral 
rigidity as of a man not inclined to look 
with tolerant eyes on the " cakes and ale " 
of life. 

Sometimes we get a hint of a conscious- 
ness of official position. It is not that the 
padre of these pictures is inclined to say 
" I'm an officer and don't you forget it." 
He is not apparently suspected of that. 
But he is a man who might conceivably say 



PADRES 279 

" I'm a priest and it won't do for me to 
let any one forget that." 

Yet, even in these pictures, we are left 
with the feeling that the men who sat for 
them were competent and in their way- 
effective. There is no suggestion of feeble- 
ness, the characteristic of the pre-war cleric 
which most commonly struck the artist. 
And we recognise that the clergy have dis- 
carded pose and affectation along with the 
dog collars which most of them have left 
behind in England. Freed from the society 
of elderly women, the British cleric has 
without difficulty made himself very much 
at home in the company of men. 

That is the impression we get of the padre 
from the artists who have drawn pictures 
of him. But there are not nearly enough 
of these pictures, to make us sure that it is 
in just this way that the men in France 
regard the clergy who have gone on active 
service. The fact is that the artists who 
have sketched generals and staff officers in 
hundreds, subalterns in thousands, and men 
of the ranks in uncountable numbers, have 
not taken very much notice of the padres. 
They felt perhaps that the clergy did not 
really count for much in army life. 

Fortunately it is not only in the drawing 



280 PADRES 

of artists that the general opinion finds 
expression. The average man, a very sure 
and sane judge of worth, cannot use pencil, 
brush, or paint ; but he has other ways of 
expressing himself. For instance he labels 
whole classes with nicknames. 

Consider the various names for the enemy 
which are current in the trenches. " Hun " 
was not the invention of the army. It 
came from the newspapers. The soldier 
uses it, but not with delight. He prefers 
" Boche " ; but that was not his own word 
either. It originated with the French. And 
there is a noticeable difference between the 
way a Frenchman and an Englishman say 
"Boche." The Frenchman hisses it. In 
his mouth it is eloquent of a bitter hatred 
for something vile. An Englishman says 
"Boche " quite differently. You feel as you 
listen to him that he regards his enemy as 
brutal and abominable, but also as swollen, 
flatulent, and somewhat ridiculous. 

" Fritz " and not " Boche " is our own 
invention in the way of a name for the 
enemy. It expresses just what the men 
feel. " Fritz " whom we " strafe " con- 
tinually is in the main a ridiculous person, 
and any healthy-minded man wants to rag 
him. There is an inflated pomposity about 



PADRES 281 

Fritz ; but given the necessary hammering 
he may turn out to be a human being like 
ourselves. He wants to get home just as 
we do. He likes beer, which is very hard 
to come by for any of us, and he enjoys 
tobacco. 

Or take another nickname. Generals and 
staff officers are called " Brass Hats." The 
name was fastened on them early in the war 
and it still sticks. Perhaps if we were 
starting fresh now we should give them 
another name, a kindlier one. For a " Brass 
Hat," if such a thing existed, would be more 
ornamental than useful. It would occupy 
a man's time in polishing it, would shine, 
no doubt agreeably, on ceremonial occasions, 
but would be singularly uncomfortable for 
daily wear. Is that the sort of way the 
fighting men thought of the staff after Neuve 
Chapelle ? The name suggests some such 
general opinion and the name passed into 
general use. 

"Padre" is another nickname; but a 
friendly one. I should much rather be 
called a padre than a Brass Hat. I should 
much rather be called a padre than a parson. 
It is an achievement, something they may 
well be proud of, that the old regular chap- 
lains were spoken of by officers and men 



282 PADRES 

alike as padres. I, who had no part in 
winning the name, feel a real satisfaction 
when I open a letter from man or officer 
and find that it begins " Dear Padre." 

And yet — there is a certain playfulness 
in the name. A padre is not one of the 
serious things in army life. No such nick- 
name attaches or could attach to a CO. or 
a sergeant-major. They matter. A padre 
does not matter much. Religion, his proper 
business, is an extra, like music lessons at 
a public school. Music is a great art, of 
course. No one denies it, chiefly because 
no normal boy thinks about it at all. The 
real affairs of life are the Latin grammar 
and the cricket bat. There is a master who 
gives music lessons to those who want such 
things. He may be an amiable and estim- 
able man ; but compared to a form master 
or the ex- blue who is capable of making 
his century against first-class bowling, he is 
nobody. 

Some feeling of that kind finds expression in 
the nickname "padre." It is not contempt. 
There is not room for real contempt along- 
side of the affection which the name implies. 
It's just a sense that, neither for good nor 
evil, is the padre of much importance. 
It is impossible to imagine King Henry 



PADRES 283 

speaking of Thomas a Becket as the padre. 
He hated that archbishop, and he also feared 
him, so he called him, not a padre, but a 
turbulent priest. 

Is the kingdom of heaven best advanced 
by men who strike the world as being 
" padres " or by " turbulent priests " ? It 
is a very nice question. 

There is yet another way in which we get 
at that most elusive thing, popular opinion. 
Stories are told and jokes passed from mouth 
to mouth. It is not the least necessary 
that the stories should be true, literally. 
They are indeed much more likely to give 
us what we want, a glimpse into the mind 
of the average man, if they are cheerily 
unconnected with sordid facts. No one 
supposes that any colonial colonel ever 
begged his men not to address him as " Sam " 
in the presence of an English general. But 
the story gives us a true idea of the impres- 
sion made on the minds of the home army 
by the democratic spirit of the men from 
overseas. 

I only know one padre story which has 
become universally popular. It takes the 
form of a dialogue. 

Sentry : " Who goes there ? " 

Padre : " Chaplain." 



284 PADRES 

Sentry : " Pass, Charlie Chaplin, and all's 
well." 

It is not a very instructive story, though 
the pun is only fully appreciated when we 
realise that it depends for its value on the 
contrast between a man whose business is 
the comedy of grimace and one who is 
concerned with very serious things. That 
in itself is a popular judgment. Religion 
is a solemn business, and the church stands 
against the picture house in sharp contrast ; 
the resemblance between chaplain and 
Chaplin being no more than an accident of 
sound. 

There are other stories — not " best sellers," 
but with a respectable circulation — which 
throw more light on the way the padre is 
regarded. For instance, a certain fledgling 
curate was sent to visit a detention camp. 
He returned to his senior officer and gave 
a glowing account of his reception. The 
prisoners, no hardened scoundrels as he 
supposed, had gathered round him, had 
listened eagerly while he read and expounded 
a chapter of St. John's Gospel, had shown 
every sign of pious penitence. Thrusting 
his hand in his pocket while relating his 
experience, this poor man found that his 
cigarette case, his pipe, his tobacco pouch, 



PADRES 285 

his knife, his pencil, and some loose change 
had been taken from him while he discoursed 
on the Gospel of St. John. 

I like to think that men will tell a story 
like that about their clergy. The padre, 
an ideal figure, who is the hero of it, will 
fail to win respect perhaps. He will, if he 
preserve his innocence, win love. There 
will come a day when even those prisoners 

will . See Book I of Les Miserables and 

the Gospel generally. 

A chaplain, tins time no mere boy, but a 
senior man of great experience, was called on 
to hold a service for a battalion which was 
to go next day into the firing-line. This 
particular battalion was fresh from England 
and had never been under fire. It wanted a 
religious service. The chaplain preached to 
it on tithes considered as a divine institution. 

I am sure that story is not true. It cannot 
be. No human being is capable of so gro- 
tesque an action. But consider the fact 
that such a story has been invented and is 
told. It seems that men — in this case 
hungry sheep who look up — actually find 
that the sermons preached to them have 
no conceivable connection with reality. 
About to die, they as*k for words of life — 
they are given disquisitions on tithes. 



236 PADRES 

" Well, sir " — I have had this said to me 
a hundred times — " I am not a religious 
man." If religion is really presented to the 
ordinary man as " tithes," or for that matter 
as a " scheme of salvation," or " sound 
church teaching," it is no wonder that he 
stands a bit away from it. I in no way 
mean to suggest that all religion in the army 
is of this kind. But the broadly indis- 
putable result of the preaching to which 
our men have been subjected is this : They 
have come to regard religion as an obscure 
and difficult subject in which a few people 
with eccentric tastes are interested, but 
which simple men had better leave alone. 
And the tragedy lies in the fact that the 
very men who think and speak thus about 
religion have in them something very like 
the spirit of Christ. 

The padres themselves, the best and most 
earnest of them, are painfully aware that the 
ordinary pulpit sermon is remote, utterly 
and hopelessly, from the lives of the men, 
is in fact a so many times repeated essay 
on tithes. And the padres, again the best 
of them, are not content to be just padres. 
They feel that they ought to have a message 
to deliver, that they have one if only they 
can disentangle it from the unrealities which 



PADRES 287 

have somehow got coiled up with it. All 
the odd little eccentricities in the form of 
service and the recent fashion of spicing 
sermons with unexpected swear-words are 
just pathetic efforts to wriggle out of the 
clothes of ecclesiastical propriety. 

But something more is wanted. It is of 
little avail to hand round cigarettes before 
reading the first lesson, or to say that God 
isn't a bloody fool, unless some connection 
can be established between the religion 
which the men have and the religion which 
Christ taught. 

There is another story which should be 
told for the sake of the light it gives on 
the way men regard the padres, or used to 
regard them. They are less inclined to 
this view now. 

A chaplain, wandering about behind the 
lines, found a group of men and sat down 
among them. He chatted for a while. 
Then one of the men said "Beg pardon, sir, 
but do you know who we are ? " The chap- 
lain did not. " I thought not, sir," said 
the man. " If you did you wouldn't stay. 
We're prisoners, sir, waiting to be sent off 
for Field Punishment No. 1." 

The story often finishes at that point, 
leaving it to be supposed that the padre was 



288 PADRES 

unpleasantly surprised at finding himself on 
friendly terms with sinners, but there is a 
version sometimes told which gives the 
padre's answer. " It's where I ought to be." 

I am not, I hope, over-sanguine, but I 
think that men are beginning to realise that 
the padre is not a supernumerary member 
of the officers' mess, nor concerned only with 
the small number of men who make a pro- 
fession of religion ; that he is neither a 
member of the upper, officer, class, nor a 
mild admirer of the goody-goody, but — shall 
we say ? — a friend of publicans and sinners. 

It is a confusing question, this one of the 
religion of the soldier, who is nowadays the 
ordinary man, and his relation to the Church 
or the churches. But we do get a glimpse 
of his mind when we understand how he 
thinks of the clergy. He knows them better 
out in France than he ever did at home, 
and they know him better. He has recog- 
nised the " parson " as a padre and a 

good sport. That is something. Will the 
padre, before this abominable war is over 
and his opportunity past, be able to establish 
his position as something more, as perhaps 
the minister and steward of God's mysteries ? 



CHAPTER XIX 

CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

I stood, with my friend M. beside me, on 
the top of a hill and looked down at a large 
camp spread out along the valley beneath us. 
It was growing dark. The lines of lights 
along the roads shone bright and clear. 
Lights twinkled from the windows of busy 
orderly-rooms and offices. Lights shone, 
browny red, through the canvas of the tents. 
The noise of thousands of men, talking, 
laughing, singing, rose to us, a confused 
murmur of sound. As we stood there, 
looking, listening, a bugle sounded from one 
corner of the great camp, blowing the " Last 
Post." One after another, from all direc- 
tions, many bugles took up the sound. 
Lights were extinguished. Silence followed 
by degrees. We scrambled down a steep 
path to our quarters. 

" This," I said, " is not an army. It is 
an empire in arms." 

M. would never have made a remark of 

19 289 



290 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

that kind. He has too much common sense 
to allow himself to talk big. He is, of all 
men known to me, least inclined to senti- 
mentality. He did not even answer me. 
If he had he would probably have pointed 
out to me that I was wrong. What lay 
below us, a small part of the B.E.F., was an 
army, if discipline, skill, valour, and unity 
are what distinguish an army from a mob. 

Yet what I said meant something. I had 
seen enough of the professional soldiers of 
the old army, officers and N.C.O.'s, to know 
that the men who are now fighting are 
soldiers with a difference. They do not 
conform to the type which we knew as the 
soldier type before the war. Neither officers 
nor men are the same. Only in the cavalry, 
and perhaps in the Guards, do we now find 
the spirit, or, if spirit is the wrong word, the 
flavour of the old army. The professional 
soldier, save among field officers and the 
older N.C.O.'s, is becoming rare. The citizen 
soldier has taken his place. 

To say this is to repeat a commonplace. 
My remark was a commonplace, stale with 
reiteration. But it is the nature of common- 
places and truisms that they only become 
real to us when we discover them for our- 
selves. I was familiar with the idea of the 



CITIZEN SOLDIERS 291 

citizen soldier, with the very phrase " an 
empire in arms," long before I went to 
France. Yet my earliest experiences were 
a surprise to me. I had believed, but I had 
not realised, that our ranks indeed contain 
" all sorts and conditions of men." 

I remember very well the first time that 
the truism began to assert itself as a truth 
to me. I was in a soldiers' club, one of 
those excellent places of refreshment and 
recreation run by societies and individuals 
for the benefit of our men. It was an 
abominable evening. Snow, that was half 
sleet, was driven across the camp by a strong 
wind. Melting snow lay an inch deep on 
the ground. The club, naturally under the 
circumstances, was crammed. Men sat at 
every table, reading papers, writing letters, 
playing draughts and dominoes. They stood 
about with cups of tea and cocoa in their 
hands. They crowded round the fires. The 
steam of wet clothes and thick clouds of 
tobacco smoke filled the air and dimmed the 
light from lamps, feeble at best, which hung 
from ceiling and wall. 

In one corner a man sat on a rickety 
chair. His back was turned to the room. 
He faced the two walls of his corner. The 
position struck me as odd until I noticed 



292 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

that he sat that way in order to get a little 
light on the pages of the book he read. It 
was Oscar Wilde's Be Profundis. It was. 
I suppose, part of my business to make 
friends of the men round me. I managed 
with some difficulty to get into conversation 
with that man. He turned his chair half 
round and, starting from Oscar Wilde, gave 
me his views on prison life. The private 
soldier, coming under military discipline, 
is a prisoner, so this man thought. He did 
not deny that it may be worth while to go 
to prison for a good cause. But prison 
life is as galling and abominable for a martyr 
as for a criminal. 

There is a stir among the men. A lady, 
heavily cloaked and waterproofed, made a 
slow progress through the room, staring 
round her with curious eyes. She was a 
stranger, evidently a distinguished stranger, 
for she was escorted by a colonel and two 
other officers. My friend nodded towards 
her. 

" Do you know her ? " he asked. 

I shook my head. He named a very 
eminent novelist. 

" Doing a tour of the Expeditionary Force, 
I expect," he said. " I used to review her 
books before the war. I'd rather like to 



CITIZEN SOLDIERS 293 

review the one she'll write about this. 
Once" — he added this reminiscence after a 
pause — " I dined in her company in 
London." 

He was a journalist before he enlisted. 
If he survives he will no doubt write a book, 
a new De Profundis, and it ought to be worth 
reading. 

I went one afternoon to a railway station 
to say good-bye to some friends of mine 
who were off to the firing-line. Troops 
usually left the base where I was then 
stationed at 10 or 11 o'clock at night 
and we did not go to see them off. This 
party — they were Canadians — started in the 
afternoon and from an unusual station. 
The scene was familiar enough. There was 
a long train, for the most part goods waggons. 
There were hundreds of laughing men, and 
a buffet where ladies— those ladies who 
somehow never fail — gave tea and cocoa to 
waiting crowds. Sergeants served out 
rations for the journey. Officers struggled 
to get their kit into compartments already 
overfull. 

I made my way slowly along the platform, 
looking for my friends. In halting European 
French I answered inquiries made of me in 
fluent Canadian French by a soldier of 



294 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

Quebec. I came on a man who must have 
been a full-blooded Indian standing by 
himself, staring straight in front of him 
with wholly emotionless eyes. On every 
side of me I heard the curious Canadian 
intonation of English speech. 

I found my friends at last. They were 
settling down with others whom I did not 
know into a waggon labelled " Chevaux, 
8 ; Hommes, 40." I do not know how eight 
horses would have liked a two-days 
journey in that waggon. The forty men 
were cheerfully determined to make the 
best of things. I condoled and sympa- 
thised. 

From a far corner of the waggon came a 
voice quoting a line of Virgil. " Forsitan et 
Mis olim meminisse juvabit." It is a common 
tag, of course, but I did not expect to hear 
it then and there. The speaker was a boy, 
smooth-faced, gentle-looking. In what 
school of what remote province did he learn 
to construe and repeats bits of the JEneid ? 
With the French-Canadians, the Indian, and 
all the rest of them, he, with his pathetic 
little scrap of Latin, was a private in the 
army of the empire. 

It was my exceptional good fortune to be 
stationed for many months in a large con- 



CITIZEN SOLDIERS 295 

valescent camp. I might have been attached 
to a brigade, in which case I should have 
known perhaps Irish, or Scots, or men from 
some one or two parts of England ; but 
them only. That camp in which I worked 
received men from every branch of the 
service and from every corner of the empire. 
A knowledge of the cap badges to be seen 
any day in that camp would have required 
long study and a good memory. From the 
ubiquitous gun of the artillery to the FIJI 
of a South Sea Island contingent we had 
them all at one time or another. 

And the variety of speech and accent 
was as great as the variety of cap badges. 
It was difficult to believe — I should not have 
believed beforehand — that the English lan- 
guage could be spoken in so many different 
ways. But it was the men themselves, more 
than their varied speech and far-separated 
homes, who made me feel how widely the 
net of service has swept through society 
and how many different kinds of men are 
fighting in the army. 

I happened one day to fall into conver- 
sation with a private, a young man in very 
worn and even tattered clothes. He had 
been " up against it " somewhere on the 
Somme front, and had not yet been served 



296 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

out with fresh kit. The mud of the ground 
over which he had been fighting was thickly 
caked on most parts of his clothing, and he 
was endeavouring to scrape it off with the 
blade of a penknife. He smiled at me in 
a particularly friendly way when I greeted 
him, and we dropped into a conversation 
which lasted for quite a long time. He 
showed me, rather shyly, a pocket edition 
of Herodotus which he had carried about in 
his pocket and had read at intervals during 
the time he was fighting on the Somme. 

A private who quotes Latin in the waggon 
of a troop train. A battered soldier who 
reads Greek for his own pleasure in the 
trenches, is more surprising still. The Baron 
Bradwardwine took Livy into battle with 
him. But there must be ten men who can 
read Livy for every one who can tackle 
Herodotus without a dictionary. 

A piano is an essential part of the equip- 
ment of a recreation hut in France. The 
soldier loves to make music, and it is sur- 
prising how many soldiers can make music 
of a sort. Pity is wasted on inanimate 
things. Otherwise one's heart's sympathy 
would go out to those pianos. It would be 
a dreadful thing for an instrument of feeling 
to have " Irish Eyes," " The Only Girl in 



CITIZEN SOLDIERS 297 

the World," and " Home Fires." played on 
it every day and all day long. I am not, I 
am often thankful for it, acutely musical. 
But there have been times in Y.M.C.A. huts 
when I felt I should shriek if I heard the tune 
of " Home Fires " again. 

I was playing chess one afternoon with a 
man who was beating me. I became so much 
absorbed in the game that I actually ceased 
to hear the piano. Then, after a while I 
heard it again, played in quite an unusual 
manner. The player had got beyond " Irish 
Eyes " and the rest of those tunes. He 
was playing, with the tenderest feeling, one 
of Chopin's Nocturnes. He asked me after- 
wards if I could by any means borrow for 
him a volume of Beethoven, one which 
contained the " Waldstein " if possible. He 
confessed that he could not play the " Wald- 
stein " without the score. He was an 
elderly man, elderly compared to most of 
those round him. He was in the R.E., a 
sapper. There must be scores of musicians 
of taste and culture in the army. I wonder 
if there was another employed in laying out 
roads behind the Somme front. 

I gained a reputation, wholly undeserved, 
as a chess player while I was in that camp, 
and I was generally able to put up some 



298 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

sort of fight against my opponents even if 
they beat me in the end. 

But I was utterly defeated by one man, a 
Russian. He could speak no English and 
very little French. He belonged to a Can- 
adian regiment, but how he got into it or 
managed to live with his comrades I do not 
know. He and I communicated with each 
other only by moving the pieces on the chess 
board. I suppose he was a member of the 
Russian Church, but on Sundays he attended 
the services which I conducted. He used to 
sit as near me as he could and I always found 
his places for him. He could not read 
English any more than he could speak it, 
so the Prayer Book cannot have been much 
use to him. But there was no priest of his 
own church anywhere within reach, and he 
was evidently a religious man. I suppose 
he found the Church of England service 
better than none at all. 

There was always one difficulty about the 
Church of England services in that camp. 
We had to trust to chance for a pianist who 
could play chants, responses, and hymns, 
and for a choir who could sing them. The 
choir difficulty was not serious. It was 
nearly always possible to get twenty volun- 
teers who had sung in church choirs at home. 



CITIZEN SOLDIERS 299 

But a pianist who was familiar with church 
music was a rare person to find. When 
found he had a way, very annoying to me, 
of getting well quickly and going back to 
his regiment. 

I was let down rather badly once or twice 
by men who were anxious to play for the 
service, but turned out to be capable of no 
more than three or four hymns, played by 
ear, sometimes in impossible keys. I became 
cautious and used to question volunteers 
carefully beforehand. One man who offered 
himself seemed particularly diffident and 
doubtful about his ability to play what I 
wanted. I asked him at last whether he 
had ever played any instrument, organ or 
harmonium, at a Church of England service. 

" Oh yes, sir, often," he said. " Before 
the war I was assistant organist at ." 

He named a great English cathedral, one 
justly famous for its music. The next 
Sunday and for several Sundays afterwards 
our music was a joy. My friend was one of 
those rare people who play in such a way 
that every one present feels compelled to 
sing. 

Looking back over the time I spent in 
France, it seems as if a long procession of 
interesting and splendid men passed by me. 



300 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

They came from every rank of society, from 
many processions and trades. 

There were rich men among them, a few, 
and very many poor men. I have witnessed 
the signature of a private in a north of 
England regiment to papers concerned with 
the transfer of several thousand pounds from 
one security to another. I have helped to 
cash cheques for men with large bank 
balances. I have bought crumpled and very 
dirty penny stamps from men who otherwise 
would not have been able to pay for the 
cup of cocoa or the bun they wanted. 

There were men in trouble who came to me 
with letters in their hands containing news 
from home which brought tears to their eyes 
and mine. There were men — wonderfully few 
of them — with grievances, genuine enough 
very often, but impossible to remove. 

There were men with all sorts of religious 
difficulties, with simple questions on their 
lips about the problems which most of us 
have given up as insoluble on this side of 
the grave. We met. There was a swiftly 
formed friendship, a brief intimacy, and 
then they passed from that camp, their 
temporary resting-place, and were caught 
again into the intricate working of the vast 
machine of war. 



CITIZEN SOLDIERS 801 

We were " ships that pass in the night 
and speak one another in passing." The 
quotation is hackneyed almost beyond en- 
during, but it is impossible to express the 
feeling better. Efforts to carry on a corre- 
spondence afterwards generally ended in 
failure. A letter or two was written. Then 
new friends were made and new interests 
arose. It became impossible to write, be- 
cause — oddest of reasons — after a time there 
was nothing to say. The old common in- 
terests had vanished. 

From time to time we who remained in a 
camp — workers there — got news of one friend 
or another, heard that some boy we knew 
had won distinction for his gallantry. Then 
we rejoiced. Or, far oftener, we found a 
well-known name in the casualty lists, and 
we sorrowed. 

Sometimes our friends came back to us, 
wounded afresh or ground down again to 
sickness by the pitiless machine. They 
emerged from the fog which surrounded for 
us the mysterious and awful " Front," and 
we welcomed them. But they told us very 
little. The soldier, whatever his position 
or education was in civil life, is strangely 
inarticulate. He will speak in general terms 
of " stunts " and scraps, of being " up 



302 CITIZEN SOLDIERS 

against it," and of " carrying on " ; but of 
the living details of life in the trenches or on 
the battle-field he has little to say. Still 
less will he speak of feelings, emotions, hopes, 
and fears. I suppose that life in the midst 
of visible death is too awful a thing to talk 
of and that there is no language in which 
to express the terrific waves of fear, horror, 
hope, and exaltation. 

Perhaps we may find in the very mon- 
strousness of this war an explanation of the 
soldier's unceasing effort to treat the whole 
business as a joke, to laugh at the very 
worst that can befall him. With men of 
other nations it is different no doubt. The 
French fight gloriously and seem to live in a 
high, heroic mood. The men of our empire, 
of all parts of it, jest in the presence of terror, 
perhaps because the alternative to jesting 
is either fear or tears. Others may mis- 
understand us. Often we do not understand 
ourselves. It is not easy to think of Sam 
Weller or Mark Tapley as the hero of a 
stricken field. Yet it is by men with Sam 
Weller' s quaint turn of wit and Mark 
Tapley' s unfailing cheerfulness that the great 
battles in France and Belgium are being 
won. 



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